Tom Flanagan gave us a glimpse behind the Conservative curtain in his book Harper’s Team.

Among the “ten commandments” that explained the party’s rise to power were “inclusion” – the appeal to minority groups – and “self-discipline” – the obligation to limit the bozo eruptions by MPs that had caused the party such grief in previous elections.

John Williamson has not so much broken those golden rules, as taken a baseball bat and bludgeoned them into atoms. The New Brunswick MP, and former director of communications for Stephen Harper, said at a weekend conference of conservatives in Ottawa it made no sense to pay “whities” to stay home, while companies were bringing in “brown people” as temporary foreign workers.

Mr. Williamson has apologized unreservedly for the comments, which sounded like they could have come from the mouth of Archie Bunker, in one of his rants about the “good old days” living in segregated neighbourhoods.

But the damage has been done. In the 2011 general election, the Conservatives won 42% of the votes from ethnic minorities born outside Canada, and 37% support from those born in Canada. Not being white used to be a fairly reliable predictor that voters were not Conservatives — in 2003, non-whites were three times more likely to vote Liberal. That is not the case anymore, but many ethnic voters will look at Mr. Williamson’s comments and wonder if they really are welcome in the Conservative Party.

Related

Jinny Sims, the NDP’s critic on employment and social development, was born in India and raised her objection to “fear-mongering and divisive politics” during Question Period on Monday. “A Conservative MP made disgusting claims that the real problem is too many brown-skinned people coming to our country,” she said.

I have known John Williamson a long time – he is a former editorial writer for this newspaper. I don’t think he is a racist. But he used racist language in a clumsy fashion to try to make a point about welfare cheats and the iniquitous nature of paying Employment Insurance to people who sit at home, while allowing employers to import cheap foreign labour.

Even if his point had been better made, it would not have been well made. It might work for a member of the opposition to complain about the shortcomings of current policy but Mr. Williamson is a member of the governing party.

Far be it for me to intervene in the Conservative Party’s domestic hell but it should be pointed out that the government has taken steps to tighten up both the EI program and the Temporary Foreign Workers scheme.

In 2012, the Conservatives brought in new legislation that obliged healthy workers to take a job within a one-hour commute, even if wages were only 70% of their previous wage. The new law was designed to bring an end to the ridiculous situation where people describing their occupational classification as “food counter attendant” were claiming EI, while thousands of foreign workers filled those jobs.

Once again the Conservatives have not been given the benefit of the doubt because of their own history of hard-ball tactics

Last year, the government said it will reduce the number of temporary foreign workers allowed into the country from 31,000 — 1.1% of all workers in Canada — to 16,278 by 2016. Many small business people in the West argued that this is taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut and will drive up costs for those firms unable to fill all their vacancies from the domestic labour force.

But it suggests the scenario painted so colourfully by Mr. Williamson is rare, and likely getting more rare.

It may be that Mr. Williamson doesn’t think the government’s EI reforms have gone far enough. If that’s the case, he didn’t say so explicitly.

He did say that he believes employers in his region should fill job vacancies by prioritizing Canadians for available jobs.

Last year, the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, a Halifax-based think tank, released a report showing that the total number of temporary foreign workers in Atlantic Canada was 10,900 – three times as many as 2005. But the government’s TFW reforms should reverse that trend. It may be that further EI reforms are required to make sure it always pays to take a job. But that point has been lost in the race-baiting spat.

Once again the Conservatives have not been given the benefit of the doubt because of their own history of hard-ball tactics.

Another golden rule revealed by Mr. Flanagan, much to the chagrin of Mr. Harper, who excommunicated his former advisor upon publication, was the dog-whistle nature of Conservative politics. The time-honoured tradition for raising money is to make people angry and afraid by setting up an opponent for them to give against.

Perhaps that was Mr. Williamson’s intent, although in this case it’s not clear whether the straw man was meant to be idle EI recipients, foreign workers or his own government.

Whether it was premeditated, or simply a rush of blood to the head, Mr. Williamson and the whole Conservative Party have cause to be grateful that he wasn’t speaking in the middle of the election campaign. Over such political bloopers are victories won and lost.

OTTAWA — The federal government’s controversial proposed overhaul of election laws illustrates the ruthless, vindictive and hyper-partisan side of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s character, a former chief of staff says.

But Tom Flanagan says the fact the Conservative government has suddenly backed down on some of the most objectionable aspects of the bill shows another side of the prime minister — his capacity to be pragmatic and realistic.

“The whole episode illustrates the complexity of the man,” Flanagan said in an interview.

As originally proposed, Bill C-23 would muzzle the chief electoral officer, hive the investigator of election law breaches off Elections Canada, boost campaign spending and donation limits, create a loophole that would allow rich, established parties to spend untold millions more during election campaigns and potentially disenfranchise tens of thousands of Canadians by ending the practice of vouching for voters without proper ID.

Flanagan noted that Harper has had “this antipathy to Elections Canada” for decades, dating back to his time as head of the National Citizens Coalition, when he challenged limits on third party campaign spending all the way to the Supreme Court. That hostility was exacerbated by the watchdog agency’s successful prosecution of the Conservative party for orchestrating a scheme to spend more than $1 million over its spending limit during the 2006 campaign.

“So, the initial version of the bill really did seem to be aimed at Elections Canada, taking away powers, clipping what it can do and, along the way, putting in some features that would appear to help the Conservatives at the expense of other parties,” Flanagan said.

“So you might say that bill, the original bill, may have expressed the vindictive side of the prime minister, you know, pay-back time.”

Pierre Poilievre, the minister responsible for democratic reform, announced that he’s willing to drop the campaign spending loophole, unmuzzle the chief electoral officer and institute an alternative to vouching, among other things.

While polls suggest most Canadians have not been paying attention to the controversy, Flanagan, who has been cut out of Harper’s inner circle for some years, speculated that the prime minister may have feared the near-universal expert criticism of the bill would eventually cause the public to sit up and take notice.

“If you can make a plausible charge that one party is rigging the rules of the game to suit itself, that’s something that is potentially very damaging. And that was the way that it was unfolding so I think they took, I would say, the right decision to back off some their changes that were hard to defend.”

The handling of the file is typical of Harper, Flanagan added.

“Politics with Stephen is always exhausting. It’s never smooth and straightforward. He is combative and gets in this highly partisan frame of mind but often you’ll get a much more realistic denouement.”

In his latest book, Persona Non Grata, Flanagan writes that he quit as Harper’s chief of staff in 2005 and went back to teach at the University of Calgary because he was “tired of all the psychodrama.”

“I was also worn out from trying to work with Harper. He has enormous gifts of intelligence, willpower, and work ethic; but there is also a dark, almost Nixonian side to the man,” he writes.

“He believes in playing politics right up to the edge of the rules, which inevitably means some team members will step across ethical or legal lines in their desire to win for the Boss. He can be suspicious, secretive, and vindictive, prone to sudden eruptions of white-hot rage over meaningless trivia, at other times falling into week-long depressions in which he is incapable of making decisions.”

Justin Tang for National Post)Conservative pundit Tom Flanagan is photographed at the Manning Networking Conference in Ottawa on Friday, February 28, 2014.

The important point, Flanagan said in the interview, is that despite his complicated personality, Harper has managed to succeed politically. However, he said the cost of that success has been an ever-shrinking inner circle around the prime minister as insiders quit or get thrown under the bus.

Flanagan has the distinction of having both quit and been thrown under the bus. His close personal relationship with Harper ended shortly after he returned to academe and wrote a book about the prime minister’s rise to power.

Last year, Harper’s office joined the public “mobbing” of Flanagan after he challenged conservative orthodoxy that jail time might not be the best way to punish the viewers of child pornography for their “taste in pictures” — remarks that were secretly videotaped and posted on You Tube under the misleading caption that Flanagan was “okay with child pornography.” Without waiting for any explanation by Flanagan, a spokesman for Harper called the remarks “repugnant, ignorant and appalling.”

Flanagan was similarly instantly disowned by Alberta’s Wild Rose Leader Danielle Smith, former Reform party leader Preston Manning and the University of Calgary. He was dumped as a CBC political commentator and saw speaking engagements cancelled.

Persona Non Grata is a detailed account of “the Incident,” as Flanagan refers to it. More broadly, it’s an examination of how instant communications in the Internet age is, in Flanagan’s opinion, leading to the death of free speech.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/stephen-harpers-election-bill-illustrates-his-vindictiveness-pragmatism-former-chief-of-staff-tom-flanagan-says/feed/1stdPrime Minister Stephen Harper waves to the crowd after participating in a question and answer session with the Greater Kitchener Waterloo and the Cambridge Chambers of Commerce in Kitchener, Ont., on Friday, April 25, 2014.Justin Tang for National Post)Jonathan Kay on Tom Flanagan: A media-mobbing victim tells his talehttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jonathan-kay-on-tom-flanagan-a-media-mobbing-victim-tells-his-tale
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/jonathan-kay-on-tom-flanagan-a-media-mobbing-victim-tells-his-tale#commentsFri, 11 Apr 2014 11:00:57 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=150632

The last year of Tom Flanagan’s life offers proof that success is the best revenge. In early 2013, his detractors vilified him as an apologist for pedophilia, and hounded him out of prestigious roles as a pundit and public speaker. But his exile turned out to be temporary: Instead of curling up in a ball and retreating from public life, he took to the media, and explained forthrightly why he’d said what he did. And in time, a backlash grew against those who had rushed to judgment. Now, Flanagan has written a fascinating (and surprisingly wide-ranging) book about the experience. In Persona Non Grata he describes not only the effect that the ordeal had on his life, but also the lessons it taught him about mob behaviour, modern politics, social media and Canada’s anti-pornography laws.

For four decades, Flanagan built a career out of Calgary as a respected historian specializing in Louis Riel, a CBC panelist, and a political advisor to right-of-centre politicians — up to and including Stephen Harper. Yet all of that seemed to go up in smoke when he answered a question about child pornography during a Q&A session at a Feb. 27, 2013 speaking event in Lethbridge, Alta.

The ostensible subject of discussion that night was listed as “Is It Time to Reconsider The Indian Act?” — a question to which Flanagan has devoted much of his professional life. But the hall was packed with protestors from Idle No More who were eager to humiliate Flanagan (whose somewhat conservative views on aboriginal issues they revile) in any way they could.

When given the chance to hold forth on a sensitive subject raised by one of the audience members, Flanagan took the bait. “On the child pornography issue, since that was brought up, you know a lot of people on [my] conservative side of the spectrum are on a jihad against pornography — and child pornography in particular,” he told the crowd. “And I certainly have no sympathy for child molesters. But I do have some grave doubts about putting people in jail because of their taste in pictures. I don’t look at these pictures. [However], it is a real issue of personal liberty to what extent we put people in jail for something in which they do not harm another person.”

Notwithstanding the somewhat flippant way in which Flanagan made his point (“taste in pictures”), his argument was entirely defensible. Every reasonable and humane person agrees that sexually abusing children should be treated as a serious crime, as should the production and trafficking of pornography derived from such abuse. But the wording of Canada’s child-porn law covers much more than that: It also criminalizes all sorts of works that arise solely out of the imagination of their creator. It even covers pornography made using adult models who are merely pretending to be younger than 18. Plenty of mainstream pornography sites contain images of adult women dressed as schoolgirls — and any of the millions of Canadians who have looked at them on a home computer could, under a literal reading of our Criminal Code, theoretically be arrested for child-porn possession. Given all this, it should not be out of bounds for Flanagan — or anyone else — to argue that it is wrong to impose mandatory six-month jail sentences (as Canadian law now stipulates) on anyone convicted.

Related

But once a mobbing begins, such fine legalisms are just words in the wind. Arnell Tailfeathers, the native activist who recorded Flanagan’s Lethbridge speech, posted the video to YouTube under the tagline “Tom Flanagan okay with child pornography.” That description was a flat-out lie. Yet across Canada, the mob believed the lie — despite the fact it would have taken just a minute or two to check the video and listen to what Flanagan actually said.

At first, the social media mob leaders were Idle No More activists with a pre-existing anti-Flanagan axe to grind. But within mere hours, the fevered denunciations had spread to mainstream commentators.

Amazingly, during the two-and-a-half blissful hours that Flanagan spent driving home from Lethbridge to Calgary, listening to an audiobook version of Sue Grafton’s V Is for Vengeance, he had no idea that he was being savagely denounced by Canadians from coast to coast. It was only when he arrived home that he got wind of the video, and saw the fallout pour out of his inbox. As he puts it, “I left Lethbridge as a respected academic and public commentator, and arrived in Calgary as persona non grata.”

One might expect this book to be soaked in self-pity. But Flanagan, ever the detached intellectual, instead tries to situate his ordeal in a larger sociological context. He notes, for instance, that mob-like bullying behaviour is ingrained in evolutionary psychology. He describes the hysterical reaction to his comments as a form of “moral panic,” of the type documented by English sociologist Stanley Cohen. Since the 1980s, parents in Western societies have become obsessed with the fear that a whole army of sexual predators is scheming to pounce on their children. Anyone who questions the increasingly draconian legal framework designed to address this fearful attitude is denounced as an enabler of pedophilia.

Not too long ago, the greatest mobbing threat came on college campuses, where professors or students accused of expressions of racism, sexism or some other thought crime would be brought up before disciplinary committees based on some stray classroom remark. But Flanagan’s experience shows how this is changing. It is now right-wing conservative politicians, eager to demonstrate their zero-tolerance attitude toward criminal sexual perversions, who most enthusiastically take up the torch and pitchfork.

“On at least three occasions, conservative politicians or campaign organizations have tried to label opponents as supporters of child pornography,” Flanagan notes. “Stockwell Day against Lorne Goddard in 1999; the Conservative war room against Liberal prime minister Paul Martin in the 2004 federal election campaign; and Minister of Public Safety Vic Toews against opponents of his draft Internet surveillance legislation in 2012.” (To this list, Flanagan might have added Sun News host Ezra Levant, who in March 2014 attacked opposing counsel in a libel case on the grounds that the law firm in question represented an accused child-porn user. Apparently, the hardcore conservative view is that these defendants aren’t even allowed to have lawyers anymore.)

Flanagan had been an advisor to Wildrose for several years, but was instantly cast into purdah

The sheer viciousness of conservatives’ attacks against Flanagan was quite despicable. Alberta Wildrose Party leader Danielle Smith — a woman whom Flanagan had known for 20 years — put out a press release declaring that “there is no language strong enough to condemn Dr. Flanagan’s comments.” Flanagan had been an advisor to Wildrose for several years, but was instantly cast into purdah. “Dr. Flanagan does not speak for me or the Wildrose caucus and he will have no role — formal or informal — with our organization going forward,” Smith added.

The same day, Andrew McDougall, Stephen Harper’s communications director, tweeted: “Tom Flanagan’s comments on child pornography are repugnant, ignorant and appalling.” Alberta Premier Alison Redford told reporters that Flanagan’s comments “turned my stomach. I’m absolutely disgusted by it.” The Manning Centre for Building Democracy, at whose March 2013 conference in Ottawa Flanagan was supposed to speak, told him not to bother showing up — and Manning himself personally criticized Flanagan in his remarks from the podium. (“Ironically,” notes Flanagan, “the featured speaker at the conference was American libertarian Ron Paul, whose views on child pornography are similar to mine and who was the only Republican to vote against some of the more extreme and repressive legislation passed by Congress.”)

With Persona Non Grata, Flanagan did not set out to write a book about Stephen Harper’s government. (He already did that in 2007 with Harper’s Team.) Yet he provides us with a damning indictment of the man, nonetheless: Flanagan’s treatment by the prime minister — a man with whom he worked intimately, and in several capacities, for many years — is described as being typical of the manner by which Harper politically annihilates any former friend he comes to regard as inconvenient.

Darren Calabrese/National PostDickey will lead a transformed Blue Jays club onto the field

Harper, Flanagan writes, “has enormous gifts of intelligence, willpower, and work ethic; but there is also a dark, almost Nixonian side to the man … He can be suspicious, secretive, and vindictive, prone to sudden eruptions of white-hot rage over meaningless trivia.” The list of Conservatives exiled by Harper during his dark moods is long and growing: Helena Guergis, Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin, Nigel Wright. But the saddest example cited by Flanagan is that of Brian Mulroney, who telephoned Harper from his hospital bed in 2005, despite having almost died of pancreatitis, to cheer him up after Belinda Stronach crossed the floor to the Liberals. Yet shortly thereafter, when Mulroney was getting bad press because of the re-emergence of Karl-Heinz Schreiber, Harper told his entire caucus to shun the former Conservative PM.

In truth, it is not just the Conservatives whom Flanagan is taking to task in his book, but the whole shallow enterprise of modern Canadian politics (an enterprise that, Flanagan fully admits, he helped to construct as part of his successful work as a political advisor). Political parties are so desperate to protect their brands from social media attacks that they will jettison someone overboard instantly, at the first hint of trouble. Political journalists call this “enforcing party discipline.” But taken to the extreme, it is essentially a mob-led witch hunt.

“A person I know in the PMO told me afterwards that their phones were ‘melting down’ after the YouTube video was posted, and that they had to distance themselves from the words ‘no harm’ that I had used,” Flanagan writes. “The rationale is familiar: react to the inflammatory phrase taken out of context, respond immediately, don’t worry about collateral damage to people … To some extent, this is a reflection of the shadow side of Harper’s personality, but it is also a cancer eating at the whole conservative movement in Canada … When the Liberals seemed to be in power forever, Conservatives concluded that part of their secret of success was ruthlessness … We concluded that we would have to beat them at their own game, and we did. Harper led the way.”

Of course, politics always has been a dirty game. But as Persona Non Grata makes clear, it wasn’t just politicians who mobbed Flanagan, but also fellow academics. University of Calgary President Elizabeth Cannon, for instance, put out a press release suggesting that Flanagan had said something reprehensible, and that his pending retirement from university life was due to these comments. When federal Heritage Minister James Moore and Alberta deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk both demanded that Flanagan be immediately terminated by the university, no prominent voice in the world of academia — no university president, no faculty union, no blue-chip scholar — came to Flanagan’s defence.

When you take a moment to think about that, it is actually quite shocking. The spectacle of a government minister demanding the sacking of a specific university professor because of his policy views is the sort of thing one expects in Russia or Belarus or Venezuela, not in a Western democracy. And, indeed, if a Canadian government minister were to demand the firing of a professor because of his comments about, say, Quebec separatism, or assisted suicide, or the gun registry, or the Burka, or Marxism, or the origins of the First World War, the nation’s academic societies would howl with outrage. Yet even a mild questioning of the prevailing criminal regime regarding child pornography apparently now is seen as so outrageous, so taboo, as to be beyond the limits of academic freedom.

How did we get to the point where moral panic has completely overwhelmed rational discussion in this area of policy-making? Flanagan describes it as a combination of unlikely bedfellows: (a) militant feminists, who cast sex as a species of violence; (b) fundamentalist Christians, who have given credence to far-fetched stories of ritual satanic abuse at day-care centres and the like; (c) police agencies, whose officers are thrilled to receive the earmarked funds and task-force support that goes with politically popular anti-child-porn campaigns; and (d) socially conservative politicians, who embrace any issue that allows them to posture as guardians of a society about to descend into a hellish, libertine free-for-all.

The result is a legal regime under which a person can be labeled a child-porn sex criminal based on his own erotic scribblings. Possession of a sex-themed Manga (comic book) imported from Japan — the sort of thing people read on the subways in that country — also can land you in jail here in Canada for a minimum six-month child-porn-possession term. And once branded as a sex criminal, you become unemployable and a social leper. It ruins your life, in other words — even if the pornography in question has no connection with an act of sexual exploitation of children.

What’s worse, as Flanagan notes, the expanding crusade against child porn is swallowing up forms of criminal behaviour that have very little to do with “pornography,” as the term once was understood. When two teenagers end a sexual relationship, and the estranged male circulates compromising photos of the female on the Internet, that is a despicable act. But should it really be treated as “child pornography” — and thereby lumped in with horrific images of small children being raped?

“Child pornographer” has become a life-defining mark of Cain on criminals. And in the worst cases, where live real children are abused, such a stigma is deserved: These dangerous individuals really should live their lives in prison or as outcasts. But not everyone who falls under the technical parameters of our child porn law is equally monstrous. In the case of those who do not act on their desires, but are found to be in possession of child pornography, judges should possess the discretion to find solutions that do not involve imprisonment and lifelong disgrace. And it should not be treated as out of bounds for any politician, academic or journalist to make this point publicly.

As noted above, Flanagan’s reputation has rebounded considerably over the last year (in part due to a common-sense campaign led by my colleagues at the National Post). With only scattered exceptions, he has been invited back to the conferences and publications that joined the mob reaction against him in early 2013. And yet, my sense from reading Persona Non Grata is that Flanagan’s relationship with fellow intellectuals — and conservatives, more specifically — will never again be the same.

Many right-wing thinkers live by the conceit that political correctness is a disease of the left. However, the Flanagan affair shows that conservatives can be just as blinkered, dogmatic and cruel when it comes to mobbing someone who challenges one of their own policy shibboleths. The next time the mob takes up its hue and cry — against anyone, from either idea side of the political spectrum — let us all think twice before we run shrieking about it on our Twitter accounts.

“Human politics … is certainly different from chimpanzee politics, but not categorically different,” Tom Flanagan writes in Winning Power, his new book about political campaigning. The Conservative party war-room vet and University of Calgary political scientist cites, for example, “a dominance hierarchy with privileges for those at the top,” the “male obsession with attaining rank” and “lethal coalitional violence against outsiders.” In a recent interview, he compared his time in politics to “field observation or laboratory work” for his academic studies. And he’s going to unleash an interesting experiment next month, with the release of another book, titled Persona Non Grata.

It’s about what he calls “The Incident.” On Feb. 27 last year, in a discussion about the Indian Act at the University of Lethbridge, he tangentially remarked (having been asked about previous remarks to similar effect) that he had “grave doubts about putting people in jail because of their taste in pictures” — that is, for viewing child pornography. “It’s a real issue of personal liberty to what extent we put people in jail for doing something in which they do not harm another person,” he said.

Up it went on YouTube, and … kablooey. Even among his conservative friends, it was a race to denounce him: “Tom Flanagan’s comments on child pornography are repugnant, ignorant, and appalling,” tweeted Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s spokesman, Andrew MacDougall. Wildrose leader Danielle Smith, whose campaign Mr. Flanagan had just finished running, declared “there is no language strong enough to condemn [his] comments. … He will have no role — formal or informal — with our organization going forward.”

Conservative-haters, meanwhile, could hardly contain their glee: Here was the purported “man behind Stephen Harper” (as The Walrus dubbed Mr. Flanagan in 2004), the Prime Minister who perfected the permanent political attack machine, touching what might be the ultimate third rail in Canadian politics. For the Twittering partisans, mercy clearly seemed both inappropriate and out of the question.

Related

To this point, it was all understandable. The story became grimly fascinating, however, as it transcended partisan politics. CBC’s Power and Politics axed him, saying it valued “free speech” and “a diverse range of voices,” but that Mr. Flanagan’s “comments [had] crossed the line.” Then-Heritage Minister James Moore applauded this decision and suggested the University of Calgary fire Mr. Flanagan as well. And in lieu of a ringing endorsement of academic freedom, the university put out a statement saying Mr. Flanagan’s views “absolutely do not represent” the university’s — universities have views now, apparently — and left the distinct impression he had, in fact, been let go. (He hadn’t.)

As artless as Mr. Flanagan freely and apologetically admitted to being, it was quite astonishing: Are differing opinions on how to sentence criminals really beyond the bounds of discussion at the national broadcaster? At a public university?

And then, perhaps the bitterest pill: The right-wing Manning Centre struck Mr. Flanagan off the list of speakers at its fast-approaching conference, the annual gathering of what Preston Manning calls the “conservative family.”

Mr. Manning’s event attracts a very free speech-friendly audience. (The keynote speaker was Ron Paul, who is himself something of a heretic on anti-child pornography measures.) But in his address to the conference, Mr. Manning twisted the knife, warning against “intemperate and ill-considered remarks by those who hold … positions deeply but in fits of carelessness or zealousness say things that discredit … conservative governments, parties, and campaigns.” He explicitly cited Mr. Flanagan — but not, pointedly, by name.

You don’t have to like Mr. Flanagan to think what happened to him was pretty hideous

On Feb. 28, 2013, the general consensus seemed to be that Tom Flanagan had torched his career. But the furor already seemed to have died down by the time of the Manning conference. And a year later — last month — Mr. Flanagan was back on the program, on an “authors’ panel,” flogging Winning Power. It was as if “The Incident” had never occurred.

Before the conference, I asked Mr. Manning if he had any regrets about how he handled the affair. “There was no time to investigate it, hear both sides of the story,” he said, wistfully. (For the record, there was over a week do that.) “If we had had more time, in retrospect, that could have been handled better.”

Indeed. You don’t have to like Mr. Flanagan to think what happened to him was pretty hideous — if not in the political arena then certainly in the media and academic arenas, where free speech is supposed to be sacred. The contents of Persona Non Grata are under embargo, but I hope McLelland & Stewart won’t begrudge my saying it is not boring and has a lot to say — about free speech, about academic freedom, about political correctness.

I hope and suspect now that everyone has calmed down, it will be received in the contemplative spirit it’s intended. It will be intriguing, for example, to see if any of his denouncers publicly reconsider, if not their opinions, then the way they expressed them and the mob mentality of which they partook.

At the Manning Centre Conference, I asked Mr. Flanagan if we should worry about behaving like chimpanzees. He shrugged. “These are our cousins,” he said. “It helps to understand why ideas in themselves don’t triumph.” I suspect many of us would like to aim higher.

OTTAWA — Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s former campaign manager says the governing Conservatives are falling short in their personal attacks on Liberal leader Justin Trudeau and will have to shift their emphasis to his policies.

In an interview with Postmedia News, Tom Flanagan spoke of how Trudeau has been seemingly untouchable since he won the party leadership nearly a year ago and of how Harper’s own reputation as a negative politician has only been further sealed in the public’s mind.

“Justin has proved very hard to attack personally,” said Flanagan.

“The ‘in-over-his-head’ theme doesn’t seem to be having much of an impact with voters. It may some day, but thus far it doesn’t seem to have worked that much.”

As a result, he said, the personal contrast between Harper and Trudeau is deeply ingrained.

“He’s the anti-Harper,” Flanagan said of Trudeau.

“He’s so different in almost everything you could think of. Where Harper is cunning, Justin seems almost naive. Where Harper is focused, Justin seems a bit scatter-brained.

“Where Harper is controlled, Justin seems spontaneous. Where Harper seems ruthless and vindictive, Justin seems pleasant and amiable. Justin is athletic, and Harper maybe was at one time but that was 70 pounds ago when he ran cross-country in high school.”

Flanagan, who is a fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, said as Harper’s Conservatives gear up for the 2015 election they might be better off highlighting how the Liberals are considering some costly policies.

Just as Paul Martin’s Liberals once accused Harper of having a “hidden agenda” in the 2004 and 2006 elections, the Conservatives now need to raise questions about what Trudeau would really do if he won power, said Flanagan.

“The point is not so much to debate the policies as to use the policies as evidence that the government would be untrustworthy. Make you afraid of the consequences of voting Liberal.”

Flanagan said Harper seems to believe his agenda is “far from finished” — which explains why he is taking the risk of seeking a fourth-straight election victory instead of quitting politics.

But Trudeau’s personal popularity could stand in the way, said Flanagan.

“He’s got to use policies to undermine the ethos that Justin projects.”

Flanagan ran both of Harper’s leadership campaigns and one of the Tories’ election campaigns, but was later exiled from the prime minister’s inner circle when he wrote a book about those political activities.

Flanagan has written a new book, Winning Power, in which he writes of how fear has become the most “powerful political emotion” in Canadian election campaigns.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGWuN3ZVuxU&w=640&h=360]

“Canada really hasn’t had a federal election inspired by hope since Pierre Trudeau campaigned on the theme of the Just Society in 1968, and that mood lasted precisely for one campaign,” he writes.

At last weekend’s Liberal convention in Montreal, the party put the emphasis on “hope” as its clarion call. And in his keynote speech, Trudeau reached out to Conservatives who he suggested had become tired of Harper’s style of politics.

“Negativity cannot be this country’s lifeblood,” said Trudeau.

Flanagan said it’s clear that Trudeau would like to emulate the 2008 campaign in the United States that brought Barack Obama to the White House on a wave of hope and optimism.

“We’ll see whether he’s able to carry that off.”

“Every new leader I have always worked with has said they didn’t want to go negative. They always end up by going negative sooner or later.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/conservative-attacks-on-justin-trudeau-not-working-stephen-harpers-former-campaign-manager-says/feed/5stdtrudeau adsFull Pundit: The religious, the bilingual, and the other monsters under Quebec's bedhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/full-pundit-the-religious-the-bilingual-and-the-other-monsters-under-quebecs-bed
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/full-pundit-the-religious-the-bilingual-and-the-other-monsters-under-quebecs-bed#commentsWed, 15 Jan 2014 17:27:08 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=141663

The tyranny of the minoritiesSo imperilled are majority rights in Quebec that Richard Martineau of Le Journal de Montréal says he’ll soon be “walking around with a placard saying: ‘I’m white, heterosexual and Québécois de souche. Kick me in the ass.” Sounds like a plan.

With seven of 250 speakers down at National Assembly hearings into the Parti Québécois’ proposed secularism charter, the National Post‘s Graeme Hamilton thinks he has a pretty good idea of “what is in store in the coming weeks.” To wit: “Retired union leader Réjean Parent played armchair theologian, offering his interpretation of the Koran. Schoolteacher Sam Haroun took a stab at constitutional law, suggesting that the charter would withstand a legal challenge. And Sylvie Bergeron, whose C.V. lists her as a onetime dancer and ‘evolutionary psychologist,’ declared that all hijab-wearing women, whether they know it or not, ‘contribute to the advance of religious fundamentalism.'” Far be it from us to suggest that public debate can ever be a bad thing, but … well, we suppose we can’t actually finish that sentence.

Quebec’s higher education minister, Pierre Duchesne, is generally a “quite voluble” fellow, the MontrealGazette‘s editorialists observe. But he has been strangely unwilling to say what he thinks about several anglophone and francophone CEGEPS arranging exchange programs between them, with the obviously controversial goal of encouraging (whisper it) bilingualism. Well, not so strangely, obviously. “The fear of [the PQ’s] constituency of language purists is that college-level exposure to English will cause young francophones to abandon their mother tongue,” the Gazette observes. “But not only is there scant proof of this, this paternalistic attitude ignores the many benefits that bilingual college education can confer, both to the individuals concerned and Quebec society at large.” They’re right, of course. As if it matters.

Just because York University approved a student’s religiously motivated request not to work with women doesn’t mean we’re on “a slippery slope to gender-segregated university classrooms,” TheGlobe and Mail‘s editorialists assure us for the second time in three days. “A student asking for the classroom to be curtained off, to separate him from members of another sex, race or religion should not be granted his wish, and will not be.” We’re not clear why they’re so sure, given the aforementioned decision. But just take their word for it, OK?

The Globe‘s Doug Saunders believes, reasonably enough it seems to us, that the costs of ensuring that “Canadians of convenience” (however we wish to define them) do not receive consular assistance in foreign countries would likely outweigh the savings of not giving them consular assistance. In Saunders’ view, it would be “far better to deal with the problem of ‘Canadians of convenience’ using a policy change suggested by Chris Alexander, the minister of citizenship and immigration: Change the rules for obtaining Canadian citizenship so that you’re required to have lived in Canada for four out of the last six years, rather than three out of the last four years.”

The Toronto Star‘s Tim Harper argues that Tom Flanagan’s invitation to this year’s Manning Centre Conference, after his pointed exclusion from last year’s in the wake of a mass freakout over his comments on child pornography, “pulls the curtain back on a quiet, but important debate within Canada’s conservative movement regarding libertarian thought, freedom of speech and the need to keep public utterances on a plain that, as Manning put it [at last year’s conference], does no damage to the conservative family.” Indeed it does. But we think it might also be a more simple case of manypeople, inside and outside the conservative family, looking back and realizing that they vastly overreacted.

The Star‘s Thomas Walkom believes that animal welfare issues “arouse strong passions within the electorate,” and that a “lawyerly” new report from the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Animals in response to a recent cull of ringworm-infected critters and allegations of animal abuse at Marineland means we should “expect controversies over animals — and the OSPCA — to heat up.” We can’t say we’ve ever noticed any evidence that animal rights are, in fact, a big-time political issue in Ontario; nor can we say Walkom has provided us with any.

And the Star‘s Heather Mallick seems to have turned on Canada Post — and even its employees — in the wake of its post-Ontario ice storm inability and unwillingness to deliver mail or adequately explain its failure. We’ll go ahead and call that a result.

This is why the Tories can’t have nice thingsFederal Court Judge Richard Mosley’s findings in his robocalls ruling constitute a “smoking gun,” Postmedia’s Andrew Coyneargues, even if we don’t know who pulled the trigger. Unless there is some other explanation that neither Mosley nor Coyne can imagine, “massive electoral fraud” was committed using voter information that belonged to the Conservative Party of Canada. And while the party might be blameless, it nevertheless behaved throughout the proceedings as though it thought it might be guilty. We suspect it did think it might be guilty — which might explain their conduct but which does not, of course, redeem it.

The National Post‘s Kelly McParland thinks there’s a lesson here for Conservatives — namely, that their nuclear first-strike damage-control strategies tend to exacerbate rather than ameliorate their problems. Consider the Duffster. “Big deal: one Tory senator … misbehaving is hardly a national scandal,” says McParland. “Make him repay the money, kick him out of caucus and be done with it. Instead, this government’s obsession with secrecy, and with never, ever admitting a mistake … led it to do everything it could to block further examination.”

In short, the Conservatives always complain about never getting the benefit of the doubt. But as the Toronto Star‘s Tim Harper says, their brand of politics couldn’t be better designed to annihilate any benefit of the doubt that already existed.

Never mind the Robocalling culprit just now. The way the Ottawa Citizen‘s editorialists see it, “the court’s conclusion that there was a ‘concerted campaign’ during the last federal election of live and automated phone calls to dissuade voters from casting ballots for their preferred candidate is a devastating indictment of Canadian political culture.” It reflects the “I’m-entitled-to-what-I-can-get-away-with” mindset we see in other current scandals; but this is worse, the Citizen says, because it “undermines our system of political order.”

Sun Media’s Mark Bonokoski recounts Mike Duffy grenerously helping him out when he was a young journalist “dramatically out of his comfort zone and obviously out of his league,” and remarks on how quickly and unpleasantly someone can lose respect if they neglect to demonstrate any themselves.

Tom Flanagan is still ideologically in favour of an elected Senate, he assures us in TheGlobe and Mail. But considering the many practical impediments to creating such a body, he thinks it’s time to consider Plan B: A reformed appointments process modelled loosely on the modern House of Lords and our own judicial advisory committees. It is true that “the prime minister would have to renounce his patronage power of choosing senators,” Flanagan writes, but how fond do you suppose Harper is of that privilege today? “Senatorial patronage has become as much a curse as a blessing,” he argues.

The Germans are aghast, the Globe‘s Doug Saunders reports, that a massive Canada-European Union trade deal might die because of piddling, parochial disputes over Albertan beef quotas, access to the Canadian financial services market, and Quebec’s “desire to keep the building of Montreal Métro trains a local monopoly, effectively dominated by Bombardier.” “When Canada has accomplished things in the world, it has been because national leaders have been able to rise above the provincial morass, strike deals, make compromises, buy off grievances and deal with the world as a unified country,” Saunders writes. “As the Europeans have been amazed and horrified to discover, that kind of leadership does not exist at the moment.”

The Calgary Herald‘s Licia Corbella reluctantly concludes that a union would help the RCMP achieve more “civilized” norms of institutional behaviour by providing some independent protection to mistreated employees and whistleblowers. We don’t disagree, but there is no shortage of problems concerning Canadian police forces that have unions. It only gets you so far.

He’s still hereThe Star‘s Rosie DiManno is proud to count herself among the media “maggots,” as Toronto Mayor Rob Ford referred to us on his Sunday radio revue, co-hosted with brother Doug. “If I’d been among the handful of journalists who received an approving shout-out from this two-headed beast, I would be dying of mortification right now and turning in my press credentials,” she writes.

In the Toronto Sun, Rob Ford’s former press secretary Adrienne Batradismisses the notion that Ford is receiving bad advice. He’s getting fine advice, she assures us: It wasn’t his staff who told him to give “a barn-burner of a pro-casino speech to an Orthodox Jewish audience”; to inexplicably skip an event when the Duke of Edinburgh was in town; or to call the cops on Mary Walsh or flip out on a Toronto Star reporter. “Even the statement the mayor read Friday … was barely recognizable compared to what his staffers had given him,” Batra reports. “What his current and former experienced staffers have advised him to do is to get a driver, stop calling constituents late at night, get some rest, and … go to rehab.” He just doesn’t listen. (Why do they stay?)

The Citizen‘s editorialists gawk all superior-like at the “jaw-dropping” state of Toronto politics. Note the URL: /sports/hockey. We are not doing this for your amusement, Ottawanians!

The Toronto Sun‘s editorialists assure us that now is not the time to crack open each other’s heads and feast on the goo inside. “City services will continue to function until this ongoing controversy involving the mayor resolves itself, one way or the other,” they say. “There’s no need to panic.” That’s good advice. But, uh, who was panicking?

Star public editor Kathy English weighs in on an odd superfluity of references, in the paper’s initial report, to the Somali origins of the alleged drug dealers who allegedly took the alleged video of Rob Ford allegedly smoking crack. The newsroom is most apologetic.

Moving on to other municipal affairs: We’re not offended by the idea of giving permanent residents a vote in municipal elections; we just think citizenship is as good a benchmark as any, and we’ve never been convinced by arguments as to why municipal elections should be different. And if anything, after this Stareditorial, we’re even less so. “At the municipal level, where issues such as local policing, transit fares, recreation facilities, library hours and street closings are decided, it makes sense to lower the bar,” they say. If it’s important for all residents to have a voice in street closings, shouldn’t it also be important for them to have a voice in, say, what’s covered under Medicare? Public school curricula? How much a driver’s license costs?

The War on the War on TerrorJonathan Kay in the Post, and Haroon Siddiqui in the Star, appreciate President Obama’s stated intention to wind down the War on Terror and treat contemporary terrorist threats as the knife-wielding, pressure-cooker-bomb-building nuisances that they are relative to the 9/11 attacks. Scott Taylor, writing in the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, describes the murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in the streets of London last week as the act of “misguided nut-jobs who found an easy and unarmed target” — a “hate crime” against soldiers at most, and no more an act of terror than the Panjwai Massacre. Sun Media’s Ezra Levant … well, let’s just say he disagrees. “This is war,” Levant assures us, because that nutter with the meat cleaver in the street said it’s war, and why would he be wrong?

Speak, duck, and coverWhat you can say in Canada, how you can say it, and how to survive the backlash.

Oh, dear. The Annex elites rewardedTheGlobe and Mail’s Margaret Wente for her fine service as House Contrarian by naming her to the Gelber Prize jury, despite her recenttravails. And Wente redeemed their faith in her by botching the attribution of at least two sentences in her column about the Gelber Prize winner, which is just the sort of thing that led to her travails.

Crikey Moses. Barbara Amiel, writing in Maclean’s, thinks that instead of a trial, the “horrid” events of Aug. 11, 2012, in Steubenville, Ohio, should have resulted in the victim being “locked up … for a week” by her parents, and the perpetrators being “suspended from school and their beloved football team.” This is a very wrong opinion, in our view, and a somewhat confusing one as well: Amiel doesn’t seem to allege mistrial or injustice, nor does she seem to think that Ohio’s legal definition of rape is flawed, or that its age of criminal responsibility too low. So … why shouldn’t sexual assaulters be punished? Because they wouldn’t have been in her day? Doesn’t sound very logical to us.

In other news, Amiel also says that in 2002, Sarah Thomson, who accuses Toronto Mayor Rob Ford of groping her, offered to sleep with her husband Conrad Black in exchange for an interview. Oh, and she’s considerably more supportive of Tom Flanagan’s controversial remarks on the punishment of child-pornography consumers than Tom Flanagan is.

Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is contrarianism.

The National Post’s Jonathan Kay picks up on Amiel’s piece, and Tabatha Southey’s in Saturday’s Globe, and argues that rape is neither “just about power” or “just about sex.” (And not mostly harmless, needless to say.) It can be about all kinds of horrible things. He recounts an infamous 1988 incident at McGill in which an unpopular frat kid of his acquaintance narrowly escaped charges after publicly abusing a woman as “a desperate attempt to bond with higher-status peers through the collaborative humiliation of someone helpless.”

“The dark side of male human nature hasn’t changed much,” Kay concludes, but at least the abusers among us are nowadays kind enough to implicate themselves all over the Internet. Also thankful is that by the time we arrived at McGill, just being in a frat marked you as a lower-status peer.

What heresy is this? The Globe’s editorialists refuse to freak out over some Ryerson University engineering students slogging their way through slush and mud in their underwear as a team-building exercise. Instead theyargue that “assuming they are all adults” (which they seem to be) and that “they chose to take part” (which they say they did), “then that is their business.” Good lord, what’s next? Sleeping through early-morning lectures? Wine with dinner?

But it’s hazing, surely! Hazing most foul! Well, not really. Nothing here seemed to be dangerous, the Post’s Matt Gurney notes, nobody was forced to participate and nobody who did seemed the least bit put out. (Undiagnosed PTSD, no doubt.) As such, says Gurney, “this incident fits no definition of hazing,” and the outrage from the university administration and (for God’s sake) the Premier’s office is “preposterous.”

The Montreal Gazette’s Henry Aubin valiantly tries to rationalize, from a civil-liberties standpoint, the Montreal police’s effective use of a new law demanding advance notice of demonstrations and prohibiting face-coverings to arrest student protesters. We think it’s simpler than he makes out: There’s no point pretending that these aren’t infringements upon freedom of speech and assembly. But the student movement used its freedoms to create an untenable situation for other Montrealers — not least the majority of their fellow students who wanted to go to class. Unfortunately, something had to be done. And it’s their fault.

Rob Breakenridge, writing in the Calgary Herald, notes that the city’s white-supremacist population seems to have “petered out” without a single rally being blocked, a single hate-speech charge being laid, or a single convening of a human rights tribunal. In fairness, Breakenridge notes, some of the leading lights are currently in jail. But he argues that “scrutiny from city police, the pressure from anti-racist activists, and the simple fact that Calgary is a very diverse and tolerant city” played more important roles. There might be a lesson in there somewhere.

And back, as ever, to Rob Ford. Postmedia’s Christie Blatchford argues he is only in trouble for calling in to a radio show to express his outrage that a cop-killer might be found not criminally responsible “because he said what many people thought,” and doesn’t understand the law, and presumably questions the “speedy” and supposedly “full recoveries” of some other Canadians found NCR. That’s sort of a defence, we suppose — but for heaven’s sake, he’s the Mayor of Canada’s largest city. He shouldn’t be braying on talk radio!

Duly notedThe Globe’s editorialists are quite rightly concerned about the use of Canadian tax dollars to fly two panda bears to Canada and keep them properly fed and watered and encaged at two Canadian zoos. Their concern is that it might distract us from China’s poor record on species preservation. We don’t even…

What comes after Stephen Harper?The Toronto Star’s Tim Harper notes that Tony Clement and Jason Kenney took in both days of the Manning Networking Conference in Ottawa over the weekend, “meeting, greeting, backslapping and speaking to some of the movement’s most powerful figures.” They would clearly be frontrunners to succeed Stephen Harper, as he says, if Stephen Harper for some reason “decided to pack it in tomorrow” — not just because of their Cabinet experience, but because they “are both practiced in the art of the party’s puzzling sense of victimization” at the hands of the media. Seriously, guys: It’s been seven years; every newspaper except the Star endorsed you last time around. It’s time to move on.

Postmedia’s Stephen Maher expects the Conservatives to come out against Justin Trudeau with guns blazing, in the near future, in an attempt to convince Canadians that he’s “a narcissistic, empty-headed brat.” They’re darn good at character assassination, as Maher says; but he thinks “it may be challenging to define [Trudeau] as easily as they defined [Stéphane] Dion and [Michael] Ignatieff” because “people already know Trudeau.” (Well, they think they do, anyway. Honestly, there doesn’t seem to be all that much to know. But he certainly has more charisma than Dion and Ignatieff put together.)

Marc Garneau, writing in TheGlobe and Mail, stumps for a more proactive pay equity law, and commits, should he win the Liberal leadership, which he won’t, “to set[ting] a target of at least 40% female candidates in the next election.” And then, a quick clarification: “I do not recommend a strict quota because that goes against the principles of democracy.” Oh, well. ‘Tis a bonny target, anyway.

Global powers including Canada seem to be at their wits’ end when it comes to Iran “thumbing its nose” at nuclear sanctions, Terry Glavin writes in the Ottawa Citizen. A Canadian intervention to the International Atomic Energy Agency, for example, argues that “should Iran continue to refuse to cooperate with the IAEA, … [it] must consider additional robust action.” Glavin argues that “whatever that ‘robust action’ might entail, a very safe bet is that it will produce no discernible result unless and until bombs begin falling on Iranian targets. Nobody wants that to happen. But nobody wants a nuclear-armed Iran, either.”

The Globe’s editorialists want Prince Philip to receive the Order of Canada upon his visit in April. Sun Media’s Peter Worthington, however, doesn’t want it, because pace his colleague Mark Bonokoski, he doesn’t think he deserves it. He argues that his experiences in journalism, which he describes entertainingly, are “rewards in themselves.”

On free speechRobert Fulford, writing in the National Post, worries that the reaction to Tom Flanagan’s musings on child pornography laws may have a chilling effect on higher education. “If we continue to take seriously a few secretly recorded off-the-cuff words, and condemn those we disagree with, teachers will learn to fear the malice of their students,” he writes. “Students will know they can harm unpopular teachers whose views are controversial.” (That is indeed worrying, but we still don’t buy the “secret recording” angle to this story. All the recording does is prove what was said and the context in which it was said. That’s not a bad thing; if anything it helps us come to terms with the various ramifications of this controversy.)

Also in the Post, University of Lethbridge professor John von Heyking, a co-organizer of Flanagan’s appearance, concurs that the episode may inform a “general chilling effect on academic freedom.” And he wonders what the Idle No More protesters really accomplished. The event was about First Nations policy, after all. Does it really help their cause — or that of less “utopian” aboriginal activists — to make a trophy of Tom Flanagan’s career?

Still in the Post, speaking from his experiences interacting with convicted child porn downloaders behind bars, Conrad Black argues that Flanagan was on to something with his admittedly too-“flippant” remarks. There’s not much reason to assume such people dangerous, in Black’s view, when they are otherwise productive members of society. He is quite sure that “sending them to prison for long periods where they are ostracized and largely forced to associate with each other, and where they are apt to be beaten up at any time as unlucky props in the sociopathic frustrations and belligerency of other prisoners, dressing up their aggressivity as righteousness on behalf of the defenseless, will make things worse.” We are, he says, “flogging the junkie, without recourse to the dealer.”

And with that, we declare l’affaire Tom Flanagan closed. As we’ve said before, Professor Flanagan should have expected such a reaction, in that it reflects a brand of politics that Strategist Flanagan preaches. But in reasonably short order, we expect some of his erstwhile friends and employers will feel a bit sheepish about their rush to push him overboard, and he will quickly re-obtain his status of Quite Interesting Canadian Commentator.

In light of the Supreme Court’s Whatcott decision, the Star’s Haroon Siddiqui suggests that an excerpt from a Mark Steyn book on Muslim demographics, a debate over reasonable accommodations in Quebec, or an argument against allowing prayers in a public school cafeteria during the school day, might now qualify as criminal hate speech. At an apparent risk of committing criminal hate speech, Haroon Siddiqui can get bent.

He said, she said, we cringeThe Star’s Heather Mallick argues that Sarah Thomson’s molestation allegation against Toronto Mayor Rob Ford “rings true” — meaning that there’s no reason to say it can’t be true and that Mallick wants it to be true. The Star fronted this garbage, if you can believe it.

The Star’s editorialists, meanwhile, are embarrassed by the photograph of Thomson and Ford together at the event where the alleged groping took place. They think it might dissuade people from investing in the city. And they blame, who else, Rob Ford — specifically for having his “mouth open” and his “eyes closed” at that specific moment in time, and for having “a mysterious stain blossoming on his shirt.” They concede that “other photos taken at the event depict Ford in a more flattering light. But this one is front-and-centre.” Um … guys? That’s because you put it there.

Mia Rabson, writing in the Winnipeg Free Press, argues that the time has finally come to focus anti-abuse campaigns on men, as opposed to simply on their female victims. We do not recognize the planet she is describing. On our planet, that’s been happening for decades.

The Gazette’s Henry Aubin, meanwhile, tots up Quebec’s student strikers’ wins and losses. Wins: Somewhat cheaper tuition. Losses: Delayed or abandoned graduation leading to “delayed careers” and “forfeited earnings”; more intense course loads, meaning fewer hours available for part-time work; less money for universities, potentially leading to loss of national and international prestige; and a $30-million police bill, which is “1½ times greater than the sum that Quebec employment minister Agnès Maltais has tried to economize this week with her plan to toughen the welfare rules — a measure that ignited instant protests..” Hashtag fail, as the kids say.

Postmedia’s Andrew Coyne dares to dream that the City of Toronto might adopt ranked ballots for its municipal elections and thereby “mark the first breach in first-past-the-post’s monopoly in this country.”

As messy and often mismanaged as the Ontario Liberals’ fight with its teachers was and in many cases continues to be, the Globe’s Adam Radwanski argues that imposing contracts may have had the intended effect, at least in the short term, of putting other unions on notice. The Ontario Medical Association came back to the table with “a range of cost-containment measures palatable to its members,” for example, and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union “agreed to a two-year deal that included a cost-of-living freeze and a few other concessions.”

The Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer argues that when it comes to British Columbia’s presumably forthcoming New Democratic government, “far too many hopes are chasing too few dollars.” They are committed to balanced budgets, and they are committed not to raising taxes dramatically — so something has to give, and that something is anything big. Indeed the party’s message to its own supporters, Palmer reports (in his words), is that “those with anything but minimal expectations should prepare to be disappointed.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/full-pundit-enough-already-with-the-conservative-victimization-complex/feed/0stdThat Jason Kenney defied such clear direction suggests that the race to succeed Stephen Harper has started in earnest.Chris Selley: Preston Manning tells conservatives to shut their mouths for sake of their movementhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-preston-manning-tells-conservatives-to-shut-their-mouths-for-sake-of-their-movement
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-preston-manning-tells-conservatives-to-shut-their-mouths-for-sake-of-their-movement#commentsSun, 10 Mar 2013 15:35:45 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=108732

On Friday in Ottawa, a reporter asked Preston Manning if he had any regrets about uninviting Tom Flanagan from the annual Manning Centre Networking Conference. Mr. Flanagan has many fairly prominent defenders, after all, even if his opinion on child pornography does not; and the cacophony that greeted his comments faded fairly quickly to background noise. Mr. Manning responded that he hadn’t wanted Mr. Flanagan to be a distraction.

On Saturday, though, Mr. Manning went further. The conservative movement’s “greatest weakness,” he said in his keynote address to the conference, is “intemperate and ill-considered remarks by those who hold … positions deeply but in fits of carelessness or zealousness say things that discredit the family as a whole, in particular, conservative governments, parties, and campaigns.”

He mentioned (though not by name) Wildrose candidate and evangelical pastor Allan Hunsperger, whose “derogatory reference to homosexuals” was “dredged up during the recent [Alberta] provincial election,” and “a questionable comment by a prominent libertarian and a good friend of mine, which seemed to imply that the freedom of an individual to view child pornography had no serious consequences for others.” That would be Mr. Flanagan.

And he took some of the blame for this state of affairs. “In the early days of the Reform Party, we were so anxious to allow our members the freedom to express contrary views that we virtually let them do and say as they pleased,” he said. “But in later years I have come to see the wisdom of Edmund Burke’s observation that before we encourage people to do as they please, we ought first to inquire what it may please them to do.”

That’s the founder of the Reform Party and the principled conscience of the Canadian conservative movement telling people to shut their yaps on controversial subjects for the good of the tribe. First and foremost, it’s depressing.

Before we encourage people to do as they please, we ought first to inquire what it may please them to do

As recent as Mr. Flanagan’s exclusion was, the Hunsperger case strikes me as more interesting. When Mr. Manning met with reporters on Saturday afternoon, I asked him how and where he would draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable beliefs — especially in the case of religiously informed beliefs, such as Mr. Hunsperger’s, which are after all protected by the Charter and are shared, officially at least, by several mainstream faiths, not least Canada’s largest.

“I’m not trying to prescribe where the line is, but I think discussion should be made as to where it is,” he responded. “When individuals make comments, we can say whatever we want, and if we’re the only ones that are responsible that’s fine. But if it implicates other people because we’re part of a government or a party or a campaign, then that’s where that line has to be drawn.”

But he prescribed or at least endorse a line, of course, when the organization that bears his name unpersoned Mr. Flanagan, and when he explicitly called out Mr. Hunsperger’s remarks as offside. Except politically, it’s to no one’s benefit that the line be drawn where he’s drawn it. If Mr. Hunsperger’s beliefs were unsuitable for an Alberta MLA, then him not expressing those beliefs wasn’t a solution. And if we can’t debate the proper sentences for crimes, what can we debate?

Mr. Manning is clearly and understandably and justifiably loved by the conservative movement that this conference represented. As I wrote in Saturday’s paper, the Manning Centre’s annual conference allows conservatives to confront some of the good things they’ve lost along the way to power — and, hopefully, reconnect with them. But as Mr. Manning himself agrees that questioning the wrong law or articulating the wrong religious belief is sufficient grounds for excommunication in the name of victory, it’s quite clear that the movement’s purists are well and truly out of luck.

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/chris-selley-preston-manning-tells-conservatives-to-shut-their-mouths-for-sake-of-their-movement/feed/0stdPreston-ManningToday's letters: No place in civilized society for those who view child pornhttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/todays-letters-no-place-in-civilized-society-for-those-who-view-child-porn
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/todays-letters-no-place-in-civilized-society-for-those-who-view-child-porn#commentsSat, 09 Mar 2013 06:00:02 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=108631

Re: A Never-Ending Shriek Of ‘Unclean!,’ Conrad Black, March 8.
Conrad Black tells us that “none of the people whom he met [in jail] actually molested or even approached a child; none had created child pornography, profited from it, or distributed it.” He backs up this claim by saying he had all their records checked and they came up clean. But maybe they just weren’t caught.
He also describes them as “perfectly sociable, cultured, interesting conversationalists, who are “no danger to anyone.” Another absurd statement, as he has no way of knowing if their predilection for children does or will in the future go beyond voyeurism to actual contact with children.
In a 2009 study, Dr. Ryan C.W. Hall, and Dr. Richard C.W. Hall found that “studies and case reports indicate that 30% to 80% of individuals who viewed child pornography and 76% of individuals who were arrested for Internet child pornography had molested a child.”
Mr. Black suggests that compassion, scrutiny, treatment and counselling for offenders are better solutions than prison and social ostracization; I vehemently disagree. Successful treatment of such individuals depends entirely on their desire to change, and unless he can read the minds of his ex-inmates and other child pornography voyeurs, he has no idea who will or won’t be reformed. A civilized society needs none of these individuals in it. Cynthia Jarjour, St. Lambert, Que.

There is a saying in operating rooms worldwide that refers to contaminated items: “If in doubt, throw it out.” The discarding or isolating of even remotely contaminated items during surgery is simply the very best anyone can do to protect the patient.
Similarly with child porn. The “If in doubt, throw it out rule” must be applied to all persons in any way associated with the propagation of child pornography. The sense of this ethos becomes clear when you are on an operating room table or if it’s your child up there on the screen. It’s the best we can do. Douglas L. Martin. Hamilton, Ont.

I agree we should have the right to do what we want in the privacy of our own home, but I cannot see any redeeming or enlightening value to viewing child porn. Not paying for it does not lessen the repugnance of this type of material. Since you cannot create child porn without harming a child, creating it is a criminal offence, and viewing it needs also to remain a criminal offence. Have some self-control and personal responsibility for your personal actions and don’t view it — or pay the consequences. Tim Robb, Welland, Ont.

I am repulsed by Mr. Black’s suggestion that those found to be consuming child porn in the privacy of their own homes are victimized by mass hysteria with regards to their crime. Mr. Black softly invokes a “civil rights” aspect of being able to do what we want in our homes, and shores it up with the fact that in his estimation the prisoners he knew convicted of this crime are “perfectly sociable men” who were “often quite cultured”.
The subject that Mr. Black clearly needs to find the courage to address is the irreparable damage done to the children in the creation of said porn. I am also disappointed that the National Post has provided a ready pulpit for such spineless dreck. Karen Howe, Toronto.

Re: Sometimes Everybody Loses, Christie Blatchford, March 8.
Moving to the United States seven years ago brought a refreshing freedom to say things that bordered on the inappropriate, without fear of offending others. It is a freedom I often hesitate to embrace given the ingrained feelings of sensitivity Canadians grow up with where the perpetrator really ought to feel sheer guilt and embarrassment. I would offer that we Canadians police ourselves to a fault and maintain the highest standards of behaviour. The last thing we need are government bodies telling us what is inappropriate, offensive, a good joke or a bad joke.
I would recommend that former teacher Jeff Jones (“as part of an exercise for his Grade 10 drama students, he handed out seven pages of jokes, including dead baby jokes and blonde jokes”) take up his plight with the Ontario Human Rights Commission, but the irony would be too rich for even George Orwell. Neil Brown, Washington, DC

’50s and ’60s not a ‘crushing nowhere’

Re: Stompin’ Tom: Canada’s Roots, Dave Bidini, March 8.
We trust it was not just because he is a musician, but Dave Bidini erred grievously when he condemned “the crushing nowhere that was Canada in the ’50s and ’60s.” In those decades, Canada led NATO and pulled Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire at Suez. We built the DEW Line and the Avro Arrow and the St. Lawrence Seaway. Our confidence and optimism reached at pinnacle at Expo ’67.
One of the reasons a homeless individual like Tom Connors could survive was that things were going on then nearly everywhere in Canada, and if you were bored or unhappy in one place. you could hitchhike to another in a day or two. (I hitched from Edmonton to London, Ontario, in 67 hours in 1962:Is this a record?)
These were the sorts of reason so many immigrants (not refugees) turned up, because Canada was a place to build a life in the 1950s and 1960s. If Mr. Bidini thought this was a “crushing nowhere,” he did not experience it. Don Phillipson. Carlsbad Springs, Ont.

Re: Saying Goodbye To The Canada We Once Knew, Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson, March 7.
Stompin’ Tom was a true Canadian country music performer who lured in the city-slickers who would otherwise have shunned the genre. He was as uncompromising as Woody Guthrie and should be remembered and honoured on the same pedestal as that legendary American folk singer.
However, the ageism in Dave Bidini’s description of our singer’s origins in the “ crushing nowhere of Canada in the ’50s and ’60s” betrays a myopic “Laurentian Consensus” (“We call them the Laurentian elites. They are a small, select group, found in Central Canada’s major centres … who assume that their version of the country is the country, and that they run the country, just as they have always run it in the past.”) Barry Stagg, Toronto.

BC and ‘after dat’

Re: Back To The Past, Feb. 27.
The news that the Canadian Museum of Civilization will return to using BC and AD in describing dates instead of BC and BCE reminded me of something I learned as a child. Someone was trying to explain what the terms “BC” and “AD” meant. With no disrespect at all intended, I was told BC meant “Before Christ” and AD meant “After Dat.” A. Wexler, Thornhill, Ont.

Trudeau Jr: ‘The Young Pretender’

Re: Three More Votes For Justin Trudeau, March 6.
I envy the singular creativity of letter-writer Mahmood Elahi; never would I have dreamt of drawing a comparison between Sir William Pitt the Younger and Justin Trudeau. Agreed, Pitt’s oratorical prowess remains legendary. He was known to speak for hours on end, ex tempore, drawing on the wealth of a vast memory, and peppering his orations with allusions from classical and contemporary history, politics, and literature. Passion was always subordinate to structure, logic, and control.
Then there’s Justin. Mr. Elahi asserted that Mr. Trudeau is a “brilliant orator.” His oratorical skill was most aptly demonstrated in the House when he referred to Peter Kent as a “piece of s–t.” Not exactly Ciceronian rhetoric, that.
Whether or not Mr. Trudeau’s speeches are found wanting in structure, logic, and control, they’re certainly chock-full of passion.
If appearance and style over substance and policy is what you’re looking for, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Elahi: Justin Trudeau is the person for the job, provided the job is hosting Entertainment Tonight. However, Canada stands in need of statesmen, not politicians, and certainly not celebs; men and women of wisdom, experience, education, integrity, and, yes, a dose of real passion. I have yet to see real evidence that Justin Trudeau fits the bill. Richard Rumble, Minesing, Ont.

Justin Trudeau as “Pitt the Younger,” one of Britain’s great Prime Ministers — not bloody likely! Pitt led his island through the tumultuous years of the French Revolution and into the Napoleonic Wars, being premier for over 20 years; and, sadly, died relatively young of gout from drinking much too much. This current Trudeau takes such pains with his diet, his sylph-like waist, his gorgeous locks and his millionaire looks that he is likely to live past 100.
With his near-naked avarice Mr. Trudeau, fils, has already alienated many Canadians with his impolitic observations and obvious pandering to Quebec. A fitting historical comparison from the British Isles might be to Prince Charles Edward Maria Stuart, otherwise known as “Bonnie Prince Charlie” (1720-1788), a.k.a. “The Young Pretender,” who did not like the action when it became more than just dress-up or when it became really serious, or sticky, as it did on sodden Culloden Moor in 1745. Rob. Bredin (Clan Grant), Orangeville, Ont.

Truth is changeless

Re: ‘Ask Not How God Is Relevant To You …’ George Jonas, March 6.
As a semi-retired evangelical pastor, I was tremendously impressed by George Jonas’ column on relevance in religious circles. His conclusion that “worrying about what’s relevant instead of what’s right is the quickest way to irrelevance” is priceless, and of utmost importance. The statement ought to be seriously considered by all those leaders who blather on about the need for “relevance” in spiritual matters. Relevance (so called) changes from era to era. Truth is changeless, and only that is important which is eternal. William R. Goetz, Linden, Alta.

The world considers social media a force for democracy, a tool to help freedom-seeking activists elude the censorship of dictators. In the case of Tom Flanagan, however, the same system has become an instrument of intellectual tyranny. The video lynching of Flanagan over his views on the punishment of child-pornography possessors has been one of the ugliest events in our recent political history.

“It’s just the power of social media,” said Arnell Tailfeathers. He’s a University of Lethbridge graduate and a member of Idle No More. With his iPhone he covertly recorded Flanagan’s words and posted them on the Web. The many hysterical reactions to that video transformed Flanagan overnight from a well-regarded professor and political advisor into a pariah.

With the swift fury of a mob, Flanagan’s friends and associates distanced themselves. The CBC fired him as a commentator, the Wildrose party of Alberta announced it wanted no more help from him and the Manning Centre disinvited him to a conference. Elizabeth Cannon, president of the University of Calgary, announced that Flanagan’s comments do not represent her university. She also said Flanagan will retire in June, making it sound as a if he was fired; in fact, that’s when he was scheduled to retire. She’s one of those university administrators who have forgotten, or never learned, that academic freedom means nothing if professors are forbidden to outrage their fellow citizens.

Journalism, printed and broadcast, delivered a perversely distorted account of what happened at Lethbridge. Typically, a Globe piece by Brian Singh, a political consultant, criticized Flanagan’s “ill-thought through statements.” But they were not “statements” and they were not thought through.

How could they be? He had no way to know this subject would even come up. He was there for a meeting on government aboriginal policy, one of his scholarly interests. He answered a marginally coherent question, far off topic, from a student. He said that he wasn’t sure people should go to jail for possessing child pornography. He said it lightly, in professorial mode, for which he was criticized and for which he apologized.

Mandatory imprisonment for child-pornography possession has been in the Criminal Code since 1993. Is there an arguable case for eliminating it? Of course there is, and no one should be criticized for raising the question. For one thing, it’s unprecedented. Before 1969 the law considered homosexual acts despicable crimes; many Canadians believed homosexuality corrupted the young as well as violating religious teaching. But no one was ever arrested for possessing gay porn and the idea never arose — though publishers and retailers could be prosecuted. When abortion was illegal, and equated with murder by much of society, pro-choice advocates were never arrested for owning material that supported their position.

Those who defend the present law say the Internet has changed everything. People who buy child pornography for their dark, evil pleasure now support a profitable trade. Manufacturing it involves abusing children. But there’s no proof that the loss of some part of the Canadian market has inhibited the world-wide pornography business. There are other ways to fight it. Truly prohibitive fees might be more effective. Treatment (not available in jail) is a possibility.

Still, the law may not need amendment, but in any reasonable democracy all laws remain open to discussion. Universities should encourage debate instead of the opposite, as in the treatment of Flanagan.

The events of the last nine days suggest a grim future for Canadian education. If we continue to take seriously a few secretly recorded off-the-cuff words, and condemn those we disagree with, teachers will learn to fear the malice of their students. Students will know they can harm unpopular teachers whose views are controversial.

Secret recording destroys a speaker’s intimate sense of audience, the belief that those listening can be addressed in a tone appropriate to the context. We can expect teachers to avoid anything that might offend anyone. To escape Flanagan’s fate they will find themselves talking as carefully as politicians. In this new age of fear, the effects of the Lethbridge incident will reach a long way.

Now that Professor Tom Flanagan has had the opportunity to elaborate on the comments about child pornography he made at the University of Lethbridge last week, one hopes the moral panic his comments inspired will subside, and that a more reasonable discussion of the issue can take place.

Still unaddressed are the implications of the evening’s event for First Nations issues (which was the main topic at hand that night, until Mr. Flanagan was asked about child pornography out of the blue, during the Q&A) and for the role of academics in contentious public debates.

I was one of the Political Science faculty who helped to co-host Professor Tom Flanagan’s visit to the University of Lethbridge last Wednesday. The event was actually organized by the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs, an independent community group that organizes events to “to debate local, provincial, national, and international issues of concern to the residents of Southern Alberta.” They invite a range of speakers, including academics, activists, policy experts, and politicians to debate, analyze, and try to persuade audience members. A SACPA forum is both academic, where issues get analyzed, and political, where partisans come to persuade.

These are two very different purposes. One might say they are diametrically opposed, but they at least can be mitigated when speakers come to be provocative (yet productive), and audiences come with goodwill. Last Wednesday evening these two purposes collided because, I’m afraid to say, many in the audience lacked goodwill on account of their ideological leanings.

Flanagan is indeed correct to admit his “error” in using “classroom language” and “Socratic method” to pose his questions, because he was not in the classroom. Thinking he was playing the part of Socrates among the young, he was actually Socrates before the jury of 500. This difference is not supposed to be so great in a free and democratic society, but the event’s fallout makes me wonder whether we are so different from ancient Athens.

Professor Flanagan spoke for 45 minutes on the four elements of the Indian Act and their shortcomings. He began his talk by pointing out that the two utopian visions that seem to dominate debate over the Indian Act are unrealistic and undesirable. The “conservative” utopian vision is to revoke the Indian Act and therefore dissolve reserves, which would lead to assimilation.

The “left wing” utopian vision treats the 600 or so First Nations in Canada as sovereign nations in the same sense that the states of the United Nations are sovereign, which seems to mean they would have the same of degree of self-sufficiency, and engage in diplomatic relations with one another. Idle No More, with Chief Theresa Spence’s demand to meet with Governor-General David Johnston, expresses this utopian vision.

During the Q&A, the many Idle No More members in the audience expressed impatience with Flanagan’s legal and political analysis. When they were not hurling ad hominem attacks at him and calling him “evil,” or expressing grievances at historic injustices (both real and imagined – including claims that Treaty 7 is a forgery, and therefore does not apply), they expressed views and aspirations that deny the basic philosophical and constitutional realities of modern Canada. The difficulty with such sentiments is that, in their impatience with politics, they end up seeking all-or-nothing solutions. Utopians view politics as zero-sum, not as give-and-take, and more often than not they get zero in their quest for perfection.

Indeed, many of viewpoints expressed reflected a deep ambivalence toward modern civilization, one that simultaneously rejects it while enjoying its fruits, speaking its language, and living its logic. The strangest statement of the evening, and the one that best expresses best this ambivalence – as well as the incoherence and hypocrisy of many of the audience – was made by one individual who told Flanagan that “you people need to listen to us as individuals.”

Flanagan spoke of the hum-drum of politics while the activists spoke as if they wished to repudiate modern civilization in favour of “tradition,” though through their actions they showed themselves very modern indeed. Perhaps this internal contradiction goes the furthest in explaining the frustrations expressed.

For the many activists in attendance, Flanagan was not a scholar but a symbol of white injustice, and a conduit to Stephen Harper. Flanagan’s protestations that he had not spoken with Harper for over six years were met with skepticism and jeers. Even so, Flanagan seemed to understand his role as scapegoat in the evening’s psychodrama and played this role with good humour. He even agreed to pose for pictures (taken with smart phones) afterwards with smiling activists who had draped an Idle No More banner in front of him.

Despite my critical observations of the comments made by many audience members to Flanagan, there is weight to their statements and strategy. They understood that a SACPA forum is part academic and part political, and they composed the political side of the debate while Flanagan largely played the academic part. Theirs was political activity insofar as they vented. Their statements expressed their anger, indignation, and frustration at the political situation, all of which is part of the normal part of political debate. Indeed, the dysfunction of aboriginal governance at all levels gives them good reason to vent and helps to explain some of their ideological extremism. I hope their venting was cathartic and now allows them to seek practical alternatives. Yet theirs was the rhetoric of wounded pride. But wounded pride, like utopianism, tends to treat politics as all-or-nothing, which rejects the incrementalist small steps politics that Flanagan analyzed. Playing for all-or-nothing tends to earn one nothing.

Academic inquiry seeks truth. Politics is about making truth. And the makers of political truth – audience members, users of social media, Alberta Wildrose and PCs, the Prime Minister’s Office, along with many other friends and enemies – all outshouted the academic discourse of the evening. In doing so, they took a page out of Machiavelli’s counsel to princes on keeping faith with their friends, which is that they should break promises and betray their friends when it’s convenient. The only difference is that the political “friends” who betrayed Flanagan are more pusillanimous than Machiavelli.

There are two ironic and unfortunate implications to this episode. The first is a general chilling effect on academic freedom. Flanagan and his “Calgary School” colleagues have often been accused of being Straussian neocons who conspire to rule Canada and who write in secret esoteric code (full disclosure: I studied at the University of Calgary Political Science Master’s graduate program and took a graduate seminar with Flanagan, though he was not on my thesis supervisory committee). Leo Strauss argued that great philosophers throughout history wrote esoterically to escape persecution. From this perspective, the distance between twelfth-century Baghdad and twenty-first Canada is not very significant. The Flanagan affair gives non-Straussian scholars like Flanagan the incentive to become Straussian. This event gives scholars like Flanagan incentive to practice Straussian probity, and to avoid the intelligent provocation that scholars are supposed to conduct in a free, enlightened, and democratic society. It also does not help that during the same week the Supreme Court produced the Whatcott decision that undermines freedom and speech.

The second irony is that the dominant media narrative of the event, child pornography, is not what the event was about. It is a shame that an Idle No More activist’s actions resulted in First Nations issues getting ignored in the melee. Idle No More may have knocked the “evil” Flanagan off his pillar, but their rhetoric of wounded pride and “gotcha” activism cost them an important opportunity to bring First Nations issues to the centre of attention in Canada.

Because of Idle No More’s “all-or-nothing” utopianism and wounded pride rhetoric, First Nations likely get no benefit from this affair. This is the worst result that could have happened for First Nations peoples, and one that Flanagan himself probably finds the most dismaying. Worse, a culture paranoid about free speech will just make frank discussion about First Nations affairs that much more difficult.

National Post

John von Heyking is a professor for the department of political science at the University of Lethbridge

It’s quite frightening to think how close we writers are to becoming pariahs. Even for those of us who have spent decades building up a reputation and a corps of influential contacts, a few misunderstood syllables apparently are all it takes to earn excommunication.

The recent ordeal of former Stephen Harper advisor and University of Calgary academic Tom Flanagan is by now well-known. Late last month, after delivering prepared remarks about First Nations policy at the University of Lethbridge, he was blindsided by an audience member’s rambling question about the explosive subject of child pornography. As Mr. Flanagan subsequently admitted, his response was flippant and clumsy. But his actual views on the matter, explained at some length in this newspaper last week, are not discreditable; nor even much out of the mainstream of leading research.

To be specific, Mr. Flanagan is of the view that, insofar as harm to children is concerned, the act of viewing child pornography, disgusting as it may be, is dwarfed by the actual criminal horror of physical molestation required to produce that pornography. He also is of the view that throwing non-violent, non-predatory child-porn addicts in jail isn’t necessarily the best way to protect children or treat pedophiles.

Intellectual hubris is not a firing offence among pundits. Indeed, it is a job requirement.

We share both those views. For what it’s worth, Conrad Black agrees with them, too. (And, unlike the rest of us, he’s had the experience of dealing with convicted child-pornography users in an American prison.) Mr. Flanagan’s sin was not holding abhorrent views about child pornography. It was his intellectual hubris in imagining that he could breezily discuss the issue with a few quips, in front of a hostile Idle No More audience (whose members despise Mr. Flanagan’s views on the First Nations file), in a spontaneous manner that did not allow him to systematically set out the necessary caveats and nuances.

But intellectual hubris is not a firing offence among pundits. Indeed, it is a job requirement. So why is Mr. Flanagan being treated as if he actually had been caught performing some wretched or criminal act — as opposed to being insensitive and inarticulate in an attempt to advocate a controversial but arguable point about sex crime?

CBC News, where Mr. Flanagan occasionally appeared to offer his views, dumped him immediately. The University of Calgary also rushed to disassociate itself with their long-time professor (although in truth, he had planned his retirement well before the Lethbridge incident).

One thing we’ve learned is that Canadians can’t count on the CBC — or high level national and provincial Conservatives all the way up to the Prime Minister’s Office — to uphold the spirit of free speech. Maybe vote-seeking politicians can be forgiven for their spinelessness. But not the CBC. On the same day Mr. Flanagan’s comments hit the fan, CBC editor Jennifer McGuire announced the CBC was ending its association with Mr. Flanagan, a regular panelist on Evan Solomon’s Power and Politics. “While we support and encourage free speech across the country and a diverse range of voices,” said the CBC statement, ” we believe Mr. Flanagan’s comments to have crossed the line and impacted his credibility as a commentator for us.”

What does one want in a commentator if not someone who challenges existing ideas or the ideas of others?

Which line would that be? The same fuzzy line the Supreme Court drew in its recent hate speech decision? Yes to free speech and open commentary, but only up to some vague undefined point, to some line to be drawn arbitrarily based on some unknown principle.

In his comments, Mr. Flanagan cut to the heart of the child porn issue, and raised important questions. Rather than impact his credibility, they show Mr. Flanagan to be boldly willing to challenge prevailing views and to frame the debate over child porn beyond the knee-jerk mainstream wisdom. What does one want in a commentator if not someone who challenges existing ideas or the ideas of others? Does the CBC have a list of opinions and issues that cannot be stated or acknowledged along with perhaps a little blacklist of personalities who might impact CBC “credibility”?

Fortunately, lots of smart people have come to Mr. Flanagan’s defence, including University of Calgary academics who are outraged by their colleague’s treatment. To its great credit, the Fraser Institute still lists Mr. Flanagan on its page of Senior and Visiting Fellows. And in the Globe & Mail, University of Ottawa professor Richard French gave a wonderful defence of Mr. Flanagan, lamenting “This country is chronically short of people who are prepared to put their heads above the parapet. Now we are likely to have one less.”

Meanwhile, Montreal-based Policy Options magazine backed out of an agreement to publish an article Mr. Flanagan had co-written with a graduate student. The article had nothing to do with child porn, needless to say. (In fact, it was about the subject of campaign strategies in the Calgary Centre by-election of Nov. 26, 2012, including analysis of poll-by-poll results using correlation matrices. A topic further removed from the world of sex and prurience would be difficult to imagine.) But Policy Options’ editor canned it anyway.

Amazingly, the Policy Options editor refused to publish the piece even after Mr. Flanagan had offered to take his name off of it, and give full credit to his graduate student, who was relishing the opportunity to receive exposure for his research. Apparently, Mr. Flanagan is so radioactive that even people he collaborates with are able to set off Policy Options’ Geiger counters.

All of this amounts to cruel and absurd treatment for Mr. Flanagan. It also shows how fundamentally spineless we Canadian intellectuals and pundits can be. Oh, we talk a good game about being intellectually robust and open-minded. But as soon as someone slips up, we chuck him under the bus to prove our own politically correct bona fides.

We bet the editors at CBC, Policy Options and others all know full well that Tom Flanagan doesn’t actually believe child porn is harmless. These are smart people, after all — people who have read Mr. Flanagan’s work for years, and have met him in person. So why have they excommunicated him? Because they imagine that other people — readers and listeners, and Canadians at large — expect them to do so. These are the same media bien-pensants who tittered when Vic Toews accused enemies of telecommunications regulation of standing “with the child pornographers.” Yet in their reaction to Mr. Flanagan, they are responding to the same bankrupt, binary logic.

We have news for these editors: For those of us who followed Facebook, Twitter and email in the days following Mr. Flanagan’s remarks, it’s clear that the folks who called loudest for Mr. Flanagan’s head weren’t child-welfare advocates or ordinary Canadian parents. Rather, they were the same Idle No More activists who deliberately set up the Lethbridge ambush in the first place. Having lured Mr. Flanagan into a trap, they now are trying to leverage the episode to destroy his career. Mr. Flanagan, and Canadians, deserve better treatment in a nation that claims to be open and free.

This is my first foray into the subject of pornography in any form. I have never seriously looked at adult heterosexual pornography, much less aberrant or deviant forms, and I only venture here because my experiences as a prisoner for three years give me a perspective that I have not seen in the furor following Tom Flanagan’s comments on the subject.

I have met the University of Calgary academic twice, and find him to be a decent and civilized man. Last week, during Q & A at the University of Lethbridge, he spoke flippantly on a terribly serious subject, child pornography, and deeply offended legitimate sensibilities. It was a bad mistake and he has apologized for it.

In the circumstances, his apology should be accepted, and he should not have been dismissed by the CBC, the Globe and Mail or from any other affiliations. Sincere apologies for mistakes that are not illegalities or revelations of fundamental failings of character should not bring such heavy retribution as was inflicted on Tom Flanagan. This society’s concern about pedophilia should not be taken to such extent that insensitive — but not discreditably intended — remarks become an instant race to stone verbal offenders to death before they can utter their abject recantations.

When I was in U.S. federal prisons, I met many men who had been severely sentenced for downloading child pornography. Most of what little violence there was in those low-security prisons was directed against these people, for no reason other than outrage at the nature of their alleged offenses. None of the people whom I met had actually molested or even approached a child; none had created child pornography, profited from it, or distributed it. I am well familiar with the practice of convicted people to whitewash their records, especially where they are at some physical danger, as those of us who were sent to prison could be if careless, unlucky, or stigmatized by the nature of the conviction. But in the case of those I refer to, I had all of their records checked (all criminal convictions in the United States are publicly accessible); and their offences were as I have described.

NASAScientists pack up NASA's Curiosity rover, which will launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station between Nov. 25 and Dec. 18, 2011. The Canadian-made Alpha Particle X-ray Spectrometer, mounted on Curiosity's arm, will help find out if the conditions for life exist or ever did exist on Mars.

Having objected to the habit of over-reactive disassociation with anything or anyone to do with this kind of misconduct, I will not labour my own extreme distaste and concern for the subject. Lawyers, psychiatrists and qualified behaviourists whom I know and respect, have all told me that some examples of child pornography are so disgusting that even the most worldly and experienced professionals are profoundly shaken and repulsed by them.

I am sure that that is true. But inflicting heavy prison sentences on the sort of people I met in prison who were convicted of downloading this material in their homes — who are no threat to anyone, but like watching this sort of thing, and don’t pay for it or share it — is wrong and part of the problem, not a step toward a solution.

Without exception, in all other aspects of their personalities that I encountered (and prisoners live at close quarters with each other), these were perfectly sociable men. They were often quite cultured; one was a chef, one a French teacher, one an art teacher. They were interesting conversationalists and their conduct as prisoners gave no hint of aggression or deviance.

I am afraid that this is a problem that surfaced in our western societies relatively suddenly, having long been repressed, and has roused a level of hysteria that is understandable. And given the concern most of us rightly have for the welfare of children, this attitude is useful up to a point. But it is not an answer in itself, and it is not the sort of initial response conducive to finding the best possible way to address the problem.

Society does not need protection from the type of people I am writing about here. They are no more likely to inflict themselves on children or anyone else than the rest of us are. And sending them to prison for long periods where they are ostracized and largely forced to associate with each other, and where they are apt to be beaten up at any time as unlucky props in the sociopathic frustrations and belligerency of other prisoners, dressing up their aggressivity as righteousness on behalf of the defenseless, will make things worse. It is unjust to everyone.

From what I have seen of the response to the Flanagan affair, his critics have made practically no distinction between those who derive pleasure from looking at child pornography privately and passively, and those who sexually assault children. Yet few legal and moral distinctions are clearer and more honoured by time and practice than those between private contemplation of deranged or even psychotic activities, and the perpetration of them.

I was not present at Tom Flanagan’s session with the First Nations people in which the child pornography matter was suddenly raised at the University of Lethbridge event last week. But I have not seen that his own account of the occasion (published in these pages on Monday) has been contradicted by those who were there. And he seems certainly to have been on the better side of the question: He was just making that important distinction, albeit in negligently cavalier and provocative terms, as professors often do.

Then there is the civil rights aspect. It appears to be acceptable to society to have the police enter people’s homes without notice and seize their computers and examine what they have been viewing and reading, and then to prosecute and imprison them for long periods in very hostile conditions, because of the nauseating and deranged nature of what they have been downloading for their own use — even though their imprisonment could not fail to aggravate whatever drove them to such objectively disgusting susceptibilities in the first place.

I believe that this is not acceptable, in either civil rights or correctional terms. On balance, people should be able to read and view what they want in privacy, as long as they are not profiting from or distributing such intolerable material. I agree that this sort of predilection is so abominable that society is justified in having those addicted to it discreetly identified, subjected to special scrutiny, and compelled to report for treatment and counseling. But the people I met who were convicted on these charges were not hopeless cases of psychiatric wreckage; were, I repeat, no danger to anyone, and throwing them into prison and ostracizing them in society while they are beaten up at the pleasure of other prisoners often no less legally tainted than themselves, is not the response of a civilized society to a problem that requires a proper fusion of enforcement, compassion, and common sense.

It is particularly not an appropriate response given the unlimited availability of such material over the Internet, and the impossibility of prosecuting at the source. We are flogging the junkie, without recourse to the dealer, and then flogging insufficiently febrile commentators as well.

The scourge of child pornography is a terrible problem made more odious and unnerving by its revolting and perverted nature, and by the vulnerability of its victims. But the correct response is not to treat it like people in medieval times screaming “unclean” — not only at those suspected of being lepers, but also, as in the Flanagan scenario, at those who even refer in an inappropriately relaxed way to non-contagious instances of leprosy. As a society, and for the sake of the victims especially, in reducing receptivity to child pornography and therefore the availability of it, we are going to have to do better than this.

On free speech and Canadian politicsWilliam Watson, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, argues that Tom Flanagan’s ordeal has been “Orwellian,” except inasmuch as “it wasn’t organized by the state” … which rather takes some of the sting out of the term, doesn’t it? We certainly agree that Flanagan didn’t say anything that should instantly torch the career of an academic or a CBC commentator, and that it’s healthier to explain forcefully why he’s wrong than to demand “firing” or “shunning” — but then, if he wasn’t also Tom Flanagan, hard-bitten political strategist, his remarks wouldn’t have caused such a furor in the first place. As for the notion that Flanagan was “surreptitiously videoed” or somehow entrapped, we’re just a bit baffled. The problem is what he said, surely, not why or how we came to learn that he said it.

Abolishing human rights commissions is widely seen as impossible, but as the National Post’s Jonathan Kay observes, that the somewhat similar Court Challenges Program was once also seen as sacrosanct. Remember it? He thinks if the commissions keep hearing idiotic cases like that of a Saskatchewanian who doesn’t like the term “Merry Christmas,” abolition might become more and more palatable to the masses.

The Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer notes that the British Columbia Liberals’ disastrous ethnic pandering strategy, which was distributed by Kim Haakstad, who was Premier Christy Clark’s deputy chief of staff, constituted “a detailed and ambitious set of marching orders on a major matter of public policy” — which is precisely the sort of thing Haakstad claimed the Premier’s office never committed to e-mail, but rather only discussed orally, during the Ken Boessenkool affair. It’s time to inquire further, in Palmer’s view.

Considering the very frequent migration between civil service positions and partisan Liberal positions, Paul Wells of Maclean’sargues that it’s not all that crazy for the Conservatives to see the former as a comfortable nest for the latter. Which doesn’t make it OK to accuse any critic of the government of being a Liberal shill, of course.

TheGlobe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson notes that Canadians are pretty much alone among the users of universal health-care systems in finding the idea of co-payments anathema.

What’s next for Venezuela?While Hugo Chavez wasn’t a dictator, the Globe’s Doug Saundersargues that his authoritarian governance leaves a legacy of “broken institutions,” censorship and suppressed opposition, a crumbling and mismanaged oil infrastructure and an economy that is struggling when it should be flourishing. It is true that Chavez oversaw a large decrease in poverty and a small one in inequality, Saunders observes. “But, as one major study found, inequality plummeted far more sharply in those countries — Brazil, Chile, Uruguay — that had social-democratic governments which maintained open market economies and robust democratic institutions.”

“Many believe there can be no Chavismo without Chavez,” the Globe’s editorialists note, “and that the factions within the movement will fight for power and self-destruct.” So the lesson here is, it’s not a great idea to build a country that might well descend into chaos the moment you kick off.

“He was … a genuine socialist reformer,” former Canadian ambassador to Venezuela John Graham writes, also in the Globe. “Illiteracy has all but disappeared. … Education and free health care are almost universally available. … Improving the quality of life for millions at the bottom levels of society is no small achievement. He also imparted to these millions a sense of dignity about themselves and pride in their leader’s often bombastic rhetoric.” But “the dark side of Mr. Chavez is very dark,” says Graham, “and stands in puzzling contrast to [these] successes,” he says.

“And so the country is faced with the prospect of another election, with the unpleasant prospects of a currency crisis and devaluation of the Venezuelan Bolivar waiting in the wings,” an uncomplimentary Peter Foster writes in the Post. On the bright side, he suggests “a successor … could achieve an immediate economic boost by stopping the flow of essentially free oil — reportedly around 100,000 barrels a day — to Cuba.”

The men who would be PopeFather Raymond J. de Souza, writing in the Post, recounts his experiences in the Vatican press gallery, and cautions that the more incendiary the story that comes out of it, the less likely it is to be true.

And in the Montreal Gazette, L. Ian MacDonald — who, uh, “grew up on his knees at St. Monica’s parish in Montreal, as an altar boy serving daily mass for many years” — explains why Cardinal Marc Ouellet is a frontrunner to become Pope: his linguistic fluency, his age, his “reliable theological conservat[ism],” his hard line against child abuse. Despite all that, MacDonald says “he doesn’t stand a chance.”

]]>http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/full-pundit-you-cant-say-that-in-canada/feed/0stdbus displays3.jpgFull Pundit: There are no virgins in the political whorehousehttp://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/full-pundit-there-are-no-virgins-in-the-political-whorehouse
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/full-pundit-there-are-no-virgins-in-the-political-whorehouse#commentsTue, 05 Mar 2013 17:39:47 +0000http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/?p=108252

Cynical politics? Fetch the smelling salts!“The public is of course entitled to be outraged, and should be,” by revelations of the British Columbia Liberals’ cynical, publicly funded ethnic vote-buying plan, Postmedia’s Andrew Coyne writes. But partisans “can put away the ‘virgins at the whorehouse’ act. Every party thinks this way, and every party would act this way if it thought it could get away with it.” Precisely.

The targets of this program have particular cause to take umbrage, as the National Post’s Brian Hutchinson says: “The document projects an image of new Canadians as gullible simpletons, easily manipulated by government-selected agents, so-called validators and consultants.” But the Liberals don’t seem to think much of British Columbians in general either, says Hutchinson, based on their reaction to these revelations. “The Premier claims to want to ‘get to the bottom’ of the matter,” for example. “But she assigned her own deputy minister and head of B.C.’s civil service — a man whom she chose for office — to lead an internal investigation. That does not make for a serious, uncompromising inquiry.”

To the Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer’s eye, the “most cynical gesture” amidst the fallout was the resignation of multiculturalism minister John Yap. “He was not the minister at the time this outrage was concocted. The man in charge was the premier’s hand-picked serial bungler, Harry Bloy,” says Palmer. “Yap’s name is nowhere in the fatal documentation, unlike those of various Clark staffers who remain at their posts and on the public payroll.” So why did he leave? Palmer suspects Premier Christy Clark needed “a sacrifice” to “placate an increasingly restless public” — but “she wasn’t prepared to yield up another member of her inner circle just yet.

‘Round OttawaThe Post’s John Ivison reports that six years after having chucked the distribution of Employment Insurance benefits and services squarely into the provinces’ laps, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty seems to be preparing to snatch some of that responsibility back. “The only justification for such a blatant U-turn is the argument that the experiment didn’t work and the provinces have not been giving Canadians value for money,” says Ivison — but Don Drummond’s report on Ontario’s dire situation found little in the way of outcome measurement, and what there was was fairly positive. The provinces are unlikely to take kindly to this move, Ivison assures us.

Tainted blood victim and activist Michael McCarthy, writing in the Toronto Star, quite reasonably argues that allowing a private clinic to pay donors for blood and sell it on the “open international market” could conceivably diminish the supply of freely volunteered blood (although we really doubt $20 would change your average civic-minded donor’s mind). McCarthy is in somewhat edgier territory (though he’s probably right) when he suggests that opening a clinic “next to a homeless shelter” is an invitation to diseased blood. And he’s downright out to lunch when he argues that, morally, “selling blood for profit is … no different than those black markets that target the needy to sell their organs for a pittance.” The great thing about blood, as opposed to, say, a kidney, is that it grows back. If some desperate person wants to drop a pint for $20 and a cookie, who are we to tell him he shouldn’t?

The Sun Media editorialists suggest UN right-to-food envoy Olivier de Schutter, who delivered his much-anticipated report on Canada’s supposed food problem this week, is wasting his life.

Duly notedIn a most excellent piece in the Calgary Herald, University of Calgary professors Rainer Knopff and Curtis Eaton lambaste university president Elizabeth Cannon for jumping on board the denounce-Tom-Flanagan bandwagon over comments that, while inarticulate and controversial, were certainly well within the bounds of academic freedom. “If judges can engage in reasonable disagreements about criminalizing possession [of child pornography], why can’t university professors?” they ask. “If the Supreme Court could acknowledge the courage of the other side [in the Sharpe case], why could Cannon not do as much for Flanagan?” Indeed, as they say, the whole idea of academic freedom meant she didn’t have to say anything. Instead, “as he prepares to leave [the university], his employer, in a fit of ‘moral panic,’ is seen showing him the door rather than celebrating his achievements.” Poor show, madam.

The perils of free speechIn the aftermath of his disastrous comments about child pornography, Tom Flanagan, writing in the National Post, explains that he was merely trying to raise the question of whether people convicted of possessing or viewing it (as opposed to actually abusing children), and society as a whole, might be better served by imposing on them some “regime of counseling and therapy” rather than prison — where, as he notes, such services are often not available. (Christie Blatchford in the Post, and Alison Hanes in the Montreal Gazette say the answer is an emphatic no, arguing that Flanagan doesn’t seem to appreciate the harm inherent in what he describes as mere “voyeurism.)

Flanagan argues that he raised the question “in professor mode,” which is a mode where nothing is off limits and questions are posed controversially (hence the “taste in pictures” remark) so as to elicit a response from students. But he apologizes for having used this mode in a forum that was, as it turned out, much more public than he had imagined. That’s fair enough, if you ask us. We’re willing to grant him his various modes. The problem is, most people aren’t. In political strategist mode, as the Edmonton Journal’s Graham Thomson observes, Flanagan has been involved in some of the stupidest, crassest, character assassinating-ist election campaigns in Canadian history. Professor mode Flanagan now reaps the whirlwind.

All this aside, the Post’s Jonathan Kay asks, if there are better ways to protect society “than merely throwing outed pedophiles in jail” — and he thinks there may be — then “shouldn’t we be talking about it?” Barbara Kay, also in the Post, joins forces with the heretics: While acknowledging the inherent harm, she writes, “I am not convinced that incarcerating people for sick thoughts is an appropriate remedy, other than making disgusted people feel that ‘something’ has been done about a problem for which there is no real solution.” In any event, both Kays think the stampede to disown and denounce Flanagan has been most unseemly.

Moving on, Postmedia’s Andrew Coyne renews his objections to the Supreme Court’s Whatcott decision, arguing it upheld the 1990 Taylor decision despite the Internet rendering the vast majority of hateful communications nearly impossible to police — “had [Whatcott] … not chosen the quaintly outmoded medium of handing out printed flyers to deliver his broadsides, I doubt we’d ever have heard of him,” says Coyne — and despite our various human rights commissions and tribunals making asses out of themselves over the intervening years. Worse, he argues, it effectively “reverses the onus” — Canadians must now prove why their speech isn’t hateful.

Emmett Macfarlane, writing in TheGlobe and Mail, argues that the Supreme Court’s “reasoning falls apart” where it declines to make evidence of actual harm (as opposed to possible harm) a prerequisite for punishing speech: “A court is entitled to use common sense and experience in recognizing that certain activities, hate speech among them, inflict societal harms,” the justices wrote. Macfarlane responds: “I cannot think of anything more subjective than an approach predicated on ‘common sense’. … It amounts to an endorsement of a content-based approach to state censorship.”

John Robson’s “common sense,” which you can find in the Sun Media papers, tells him“there’s no way William Whatcott’s anti-gay ravings persuaded anyone of anything except that he was a mean, frantic idiot.” Both he and Rex Murphy, writing in the Post, suggest our elected political leaders might step to the plate and tell us what they think about the Whatcott decision. Perhaps (Robson’s words) “ex-libertarian” Stephen Harper? Or noted Charter fan Justin Trudeau? It’s a wacky idea, but we can hope!

‘Round OttawaTalking of Trudeau, the Post’s John Ivison follows the prohibitive frontrunner to New Brunswick, where he wowed people who wanted to have a photo taken with him and disappointed people who wanted to hear anything about policy. Nevertheless, Ivison has concluded that Trudeau is genuinely “different”: “a very New Testament politician — ‘love your enemies and do good to those who curse you.’ This from an Old Testament party that used to relish taking an eye for an eye” — and still does, surely. The really hard work will come, as Ivison says, once Trudeau tries to win an election while holding on to these mushy kinder-and-gentler principles.

“It’s hard to understand how someone on an MP’s salary, who also happens to be worth more than a million dollars, can rationalize taking large speakers’ fees” from not-for-profit organizations, Gerald Caplan writes for the Globe on the subject of Trudeau’s many profitable engagements. We agree. But he’s allowed to do it, and now that we know, people can judge his conduct accordingly. It might be time, as Caplan suggests, to direct some ire towards the people at these not-for-profits who thought it wise to cut the cheques in the first place.

The Sun Media editorialists put the Conservatives on notice: They will be very cross if they appoint some pliable stooge to replace Kevin Page as Parliamentary Budget Officer. Indeed, they would would prefer the government reappoint Page himself “and take the lumps as they come, and even back NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair’s private member’s bill to give Page added data access and protection from political interference.”

Provincial affairsDave Gibson, an Ottawa parent, lays it out real nice and slow for Ontario’s elementary school teachers: If you don’t resume extracurriculars, you will lose parents’ support, because whatever they might feel about their battle with the government they are “first and foremost advocates for [their] children” — who only get one shot at being children. It’s a pretty great op-ed.

The Star’s Martin Regg Cohn argues the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario is inadvertently making a strong case for fundamental reforms — namely, including extracurriculars in teachers’ job descriptions, as the opposition Progressive Conservatives have proposed. Why would “we cling to a 1950s model of voluntarism for today’s students,” he asks, “when everyone agrees that extracurricular activities are a vital part of the school day?”

The Globe’s editorialists chart the depths of the Parti Québécois’ hypocrisy in bemoaning over-zealous prosecutions by language inspectors while at the same time pushing to enact historically draconian new restrictions on non-francophones — which will “ignite a much greater backlash,” as the Globe says, and rightly so. The word they use is “sinister,” and it’s very apt.

Duly notedThe Assad regime will crumble eventually, the Star’s editorialists are quite sure. Therefore it behooves Ottawa to join its allies in supporting the Syrian National Coalition, they argue, in hopes of boosting the moderate elements thereof and marginalizing the influence of the radicals. Specifically they argue “Canada should recognize the Syrian National Coalition, boost our humanitarian aid and do our bit to help the Free Syrian Army.”

The CalgaryHerald’s Licia Corbella recounts an emotional and inspirational recent speech by Amanda Lindhout, the Canadian journalist kidnapped in Somalia, and held and abused for 10 months, in 2008.

Sun Media’s Mark Bonokoski recountsPeter Worthington’s storied journalism career and suggests his investiture in the order of Canada is well overdue.

Brief comments I recently made at the University of Lethbridge about child pornography have brought down a storm of criticism on my head. The National Post has graciously offered me this space to explain how I came to make these comments and what I was trying to say.

In brief, the issue I was trying to get at is: What should society do about child pornography voyeurs? These are people who are not sexual abusers of children but who view child pornography. There are, indeed, two obvious dangers in their conduct. They are supporting the child pornography industry, and they could move on to actual sexual abuse of children. Canadian law now provides mandatory minimum jail sentences for convicted voyeurs, but is imprisonment the best remedy? Might a regime of counselling and therapy be better, both for them and for society at large?

***

On February 27, 2013, I spoke in a classroom at the University of Lethbridge. I had been invited by the Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs to talk about possible changes to the Indian Act. I spoke on that topic for about 40 minutes, and then it got raucous. Many in the audience were from Idle No More, and for another two hours they loudly denounced me and my opinions.

Things ended on a more cordial note, however. A number of the younger native people came up to shake hands. They gave me a big Idle No More lapel pin, and asked me to pose for pictures with them. I put on the pin and we crowded close together in front of an Idle No More poster. A couple of them asked if I would consider doing this again with other audiences, so I gave them my email address. I left feeling it had been a tough evening, but maybe something had been accomplished by way of establishing human contact. I didn’t realize there was more to it, that I had walked into a trap.

In the middle of the evening, a young man had gotten up to ask a rambling series of questions about aboriginal issues. Apropos of nothing, he also asked me about some comments I had made about child pornography when I gave a guest lecture at the University of Manitoba in 2009. Meanwhile, everything was being recorded, though I didn’t see that.

My first mistake was to try to answer the child pornography question by raising my own questions about certain aspects of Canadian law. Speaking in a classroom on a university campus, I was in professor mode. In 45 years of university teaching, I have tried to deal with every question my students have asked, so I forged ahead here, unaware that this was a trap, not a bona fide question — a dumb mistake for someone of my age and experience.

My second error was to use classroom language when I tried to pose my own questions. One of those questions included a reference to putting people in jail because of their ‘taste in pictures.’ It’s a callous phrase that would hurt anyone affected by sexual abuse or child pornography. That’s why I issued an apology the next day as soon as I realized that the whole episode had been put up on YouTube. The last thing I would want to do is to inflict more hurt on people who’ve already suffered too much.

It still bothers me that I did this, and I can’t say how sorry I am about it. I apologize again, though I know that’s not enough.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqS4qKkE_SY&w=620&h=349]

But professors have always used questions phrased in this kind of language in order to get the attention of young people with other things on their minds. I recall when I was a graduate student at Duke University in the 1960s, a religious studies professor asked us, “What’s the point of the Eucharist anyway? Do we just sit around, have a meal, and remember old Jesus?” He could have been lynched if he’d said that outside the university in the rural South; but within the classroom, it was a marvellous way of getting us to think seriously about the meaning of Holy Communion.

In general, students like to be provoked by the Socratic method of asking questions. They respond with questions and comments that lead to lively debate, in which everyone draws deeper understanding from their own experience. They quickly learn that it¹s all about the process, and that one can take daring positions for the sake of the argument. That’s the way the professors I admired the most operated when I was a university student, and it’s the way I have tried to proceed in my own career. After a lifetime of classroom teaching, it is the default mode to which I recur automatically, as I did in Lethbridge when I was asked about child pornography.

Speaking in a classroom on a university campus, I was in professor mode. So I forged ahead at the Lethbridge event, unaware that this was a trap

But that night in Lethbridge, the room was in such an uproar that dialogue was impossible and I couldn’t drive toward answering the questions I had raised. Anyway, most of the audience wanted to talk about First Nations, so we quickly got back to those issues.

But here’s where I would have tried to go if I’d had the chance to engage for a while in a dialogue about child pornography:

Child pornography was criminalized in Canada by section 163 of the Criminal Code, which was passed in 1993. It had all-party support in Parliament, though arts and civil liberties groups expressed concerns. Penalties for production and sale of child pornography are severe, and even simple possession or viewing carries mandatory minimum prison time. In the 1999 case of R. v. Sharpe, the British Columbia Court of Appeal struck down section 163 as a ‘profound invasion’ of the Charter right of freedom of expression; but in 2001, the Supreme Court of Canada reversed that decision and upheld the law, with a few modifications to make it slightly less sweeping.

Yet the concerns of arts groups and civil libertarians, even if they were rejected by Parliament in 1993, are still very much alive in the academic community. These questions are debated frequently and fervently without arriving at a consensus. Some philosophers and legal theorists come down more on the side of freedom of expression, while others lean more toward restraint of expression in pursuit of other goals. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects freedom of expression, yet also allows restraints on freedom of expression if they are “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” For those of us involved in such theoretical debates, it is easy to forget that there may be a more settled consensus outside the academy, and that our speculations may seem disturbing, even shocking, when expressed in the realm of public opinion. Someone like me, who has for a long time been operating both inside and outside of academic life, should have been more aware of that problem.

It still bothers me that I did this, and I can’t say how sorry I am about it. I apologize again, though I know that’s not enough

One thing that legal philosophers do agree on is that competing values have to be balanced in arriving at judgments about freedom of expression. Here is the balance that I have been moving toward regarding child pornography: I endorse jail sentences for the production and distribution of child pornography; but I wonder whether we need mandatory minimum jail time for possessing and accessing it, if those are the only offenses. It is ultimately an empirical question whether we can adequately protect children without inflicting the additional harm of imprisonment upon people who are pornography voyeurs but not child molesters. I don’t pretend to know for sure, though I have recently heard from a paediatrician, a psychiatrist, and a professor of social work that the answer is yes.

One of the main arguments in favour of the current law is that the industry of child pornography is a response to consumer demand. Stamp out the demand by penalizing the consumer, and the supply will dry up because production and sale will no longer be profitable. The argument seems logical, but it doesn’t have a great track record. Child porn seems to be a bigger problem now than when the law was passed 20 years ago.

Do we keep sending more people to prison, where effective counselling and therapy are in short supply, or should we look for another approach? Would counselling and therapy work better than mandatory jail sentences for consumers of child pornography who are not otherwise involved in sales, production, or actual sexual abuse? I think the question is worth asking. Jail is a grim necessity for criminals who seriously harm the person and property of other people, but should we fill our prisons with people whose problems can be dealt with in other ways? In the pursuit of justice, we shouldn’t forget about mercy for people whose offenses lie at lower levels of harm to others.

National Post

Tom Flanagan is professor of political science at the University of Calgary

Re: Stephen Harper’s Not-So-Permanent Majority, John Moore, Feb. 28.
As a perfect left-leaning Canadian intelligentsia poser, John Moore will never quite understand why Canadians no longer get the “Liberals.”
Western-Canadian Conservatives wait with open arms for the resurgence of the Trudeau brand within the Liberal party, as some of us recall a vaguely unpopular Trudeau-era act called the National Energy Program. Oh yes, we in the West just love that Trudeau brand. We can’t wait for another Trudeau to leap in and take the party even further left than Papa did.
Mr. Moore also discounts the idea of new Canadians voting Conservative, because “a good number harbour a distrust of government.” Has he forgotten the old axiom that new Canadians tend to vote for the party that was in power when they were allowed to come in to the country? And since people tend to vote a bit more conservatively as they grow older, Canada’s aging population will not augur well for the Liberals.
But take heart Mr. Moore, Barack Obama’s in the White House, again, and Toronto Mayor Rob Ford is less popular than when he first took office. This just simply has to mean the Liberals’ resurgence is just around the corner.
Doesn’t it? Greg Pendragon, Surrey, B.C.

Libertarians, classic liberals and conservatives are more sadly bemused than angry when they are exposed to certain brands of liberal philosophy. Left-wing utopian socialism is indeed a powerful force. Heavily subsidized students protesting in Montreal and the financial meltdown of Greece come to mind. According to John Moore, the new and improved Liberal Party of Canada is offering up grandiose entitlement and “an under-qualified, mop-haired Liberal boy-king.” Put that on your tour bus, Justin. Richard Zylka, Calgary.

Porn remarks vs. free speech

Re: Strategist Apologizes For Child Porn Comments, March 1.
Tom Flanagan said that people who view child pornography are themselves doing no harm. While it’s true that harm is done in the production of child pornography, and that without the consumer, there would be no producer, the consumer is still not directly harming anyone.
I just bought a bicycle computer made in Taiwan. That may well be the product of child exploitation, as are many of the things we buy.
It’s rather hypocritical of people to dump on Mr. Flanagan when they are themselves complicit in child exploitation. John Rowell, Nelson, B.C.

By raising public outrage and condemnation about the sick world that indulges in child pornography, some good may come from Tom Flanagan’s outrageous and callous remarks that “nobody is hurt by viewing it or should serve jail time.” Children, some still in diapers, being brutally sexually abused for the pleasure of perverts, certainly causes irreparable harm to these children and the moral fibre of society when anyone watches such depravity. The Harper government’s move to raise the age of consent and increase sentences was the right one to protect the most vulnerable members of society. Larry Comeau, Ottawa.

Re: After the Whatcott Ruling, Do We Still Have Free Speech?, letters to the editor, March 1.
Academic freedom is the lifeblood of the modern university. It enables professors to address public issues as citizens without fear of institutional penalties. It is the belief that scholars should have freedom to teach or communicate ideas or facts (including those that are inconvenient to external political groups or to authorities) without being targeted for repression, job loss.
If anyone should be in a position to express ideas, no matter what, it should be a university professor. Yet, the vindictive and egregious reactions by the University of Calgary, CBC, and political parties are empirical evidence that Orwell’s thoughtcrime is a reality today. The Thought Police will endeavour to control not only speech and actions, but the thoughts of its citizens as well. Emma Barrington-Foote, Red Deer, Alta.

Alien abduction is truly happening

Re: No Doubt UFOs Do Exist, Feb. 26.
Despite reporter Jen Gerson’s skepticism, her question and answer interview with Don Crosbie Donderi about alien abduction is to be applauded. I have had direct experience myself with the abduction phenomenon as an investigative researcher. Individuals reporting this phenomenon are truthful and authentic in their belief that they have interacted with extraterrestrials.
While Ms. Gerson lacks the experiential foundation and in-depth research necessary to properly examine this phenomenon, I thank the Post for initiating a valuable discourse on a global phenomenon — millions of humans in all cultures continue to be plagued by these experiences. That remains the reality, whether mainstream journalists are capable of accepting it or not. Victor Viggiani, Mississauga, Ont.

Where is that indomitable Newfie spirit?

Re: ‘Our Little Community’s Dying,’ Feb. 28.
I’m from a small town in Newfoundland myself, and I know what it’s like to see shops close up, wharfs torn down and many people move on because there is no work. This resettlement offer (“if 90% of the community votes in favour, every household will stand to receive between $80,000 and $100,000”), however, can give the residents of Little Bay Islands a little hope, and a little encouragement.
Newfies truly want to be able to uphold their own: To provide for their families, to enjoy one another’s company and to be merry about it all. It’s quite a simple idea that somehow we have all been given a bad name for. It was appalling, then, to hear that Little Bay Islands Mayor Perry Locke, of all people, is willing to vote against the offer and let his residents waste away with no jobs, no hope — all because he is lucky enough to have a job and simply doesn’t want to leave.
No one wants to leave their home. However, many are not as privileged as Mr. Locke is. Does he think that when his kids are older, they won’t abandon the town to look for work? I can’t believe he isn’t putting the community first. My own grandfather was once mayor; this would have never happened in his town.
The people of a community are what make a community beautiful. They deserve this settlement so that they can move on to join or create other communities and spread the true Newfie spirit. Danielle Burt (formerly of Musgravetown, N.L.), St. John’s.

Vintage drivers

Re: Seniors Can Be Charged Higher Auto Insurance Rates, March 1.
Why have we permitted auto insurance companies to sell us their products based on a casino-like model of chance, the result of which has made them rich beyond imagination? The business model used is akin to placing a bet on a spinning wheel of fortune, thereby playing the odds of whether or not a specific event or result (an insurance claim) will take place.
How can people be penalized in advance for an outcome that has not as yet occurred, such as having an automobile accident? I can understand that younger and older drivers may be more prone to being involved in collisions, however, why should drivers in these age groups who have safe records not only be unfairly painted by the same brush, but be financially penalized for it as well?
I suggest that insurance companies continue to charge higher rates for these statistically identified high-risk groups with the proviso that if the term (usually a one year interval) reaches an uneventful completion, thereby costing the company not one extra red cent, then the insured party must receive a rebate to cover the differential based on what a so-called regular-risk driver would be charged. Joel L. Goldman, Toronto.